hat you include in that remark, but
I have seen him many times as many times, perhaps, as you have heard
about."

He wheeled, and walked over to a cabinet between two of the great
windows and stood there examining a collection of fans which his wife
had bought at a famous sale in Paris. Had he suddenly been asked the
question, he could not have said whether they were fans or beetles. And
it occurred to Victoria, as her eyes rested on his back, that she
ought to be sorry for him--but wasn't, somehow. Perhaps she would be
to-morrow. Mr. Flint looked at the fans, and an obscure glimmering of
the truth came to him that instead of administering a severe rebuke to
the daughter he believed he had known all his life, he was engaged in
a contest with the soul of a woman he had never known. And the more she
confessed, the more she apparently yielded, the more impotent he
seemed, the tighter the demon gripped him. Obstacles, embarrassments,
disappointments, he had met early in his life, and he had taken them as
they came. There had followed a long period when his word had been law.
And now, as age came on, and he was meeting with obstacles again, he had
lost the magic gift of sweeping them aside; the growing certainty
that he was becoming powerless haunted him night and day. Unbelievably
strange, however, it was that the rays of his anger by some subconscious
process had hovered from the first about the son of Hilary Vane, and
were now, by the trend of event after event, firmly focussed there.

He left the cabinet abruptly and came back to Victoria.

She was standing in the same position.

"You have spared me something," he said. "He has apparently undermined
me with my own daughter. He has evidently given you an opinion of
me which is his. I think I can understand why you have not spoken of
these--meetings."

"It is an inference that I expected," said Victoria. Then she lifted her
head and looked at him, and again he could not read her expression, for
a light burned in her eyes that made them impenetrable to him,--a light
that seemed pitilessly to search out and reveal the dark places and the
weak places within him which he himself had not known were there. Could
there be another standard by which men and women were measured and
judged?

Mr. Flint snapped his fingers, and turned and began to pace the room.

"It's all pretty clear," he said; "there's no use going into it any
farther. You believe, with the rest of them, tha