areer before you. Talk to your
father. Study the question on both sides,--from the point of view of
men who are honestly trying, in the face of tremendous difficulties, to
protect innocent stockholders as well as to conduct a corporation in the
interests of the people at large, and for their general prosperity. Be
charitable, young man, and judge not hastily."

Years before, when poor Sarah Austen had adorned the end of his table,
Hilary Vane had raised his head after the pronouncement of grace to
surprise a look in his wife's eyes which strangely threw him into
a white heat of anger. That look (and he at intervals had beheld it
afterwards) was the true presentment of the soul of the woman whose
body was his. It was not--as Hilary Vane thought it--a contempt for the
practice of thanking one's Maker for daily bread, but a contempt for
cant of one who sees the humour in cant. A masculine version of that
look Mr. Flint now beheld in the eyes of Austen Vane, and the enraging
effect on the president of the United Railroads was much the same as
it had been on his chief counsel. Who was this young man of three and
thirty to agitate him so? He trembled, though not visibly, yet took
Austen's hand mechanically.

"Good day, Mr. Vane," he said; "Mr. Freeman will help you to find your
horse."

The thin secretary bowed, and before he reached the door into the
passage Mr. Flint had opened another at the back of the room and stepped
out on a close-cropped lawn flooded with afternoon sunlight. In the
passage Austen perceived a chair, and in the chair was seated patiently
none other than Mr. Brush Bascom--political Duke of Putnam. Mr. Bascom's
little agate eyes glittered in the dim light.

"Hello, Austen," he said, "since when have you took to comin' here?"

"It's a longer trip from Putnam than from Ripton, Brush," said Austen,
and passed on, leaving Mr. Bascom with a puzzled mind. Something very
like a smile passed over Mr. Freeman's face as he led the way silently
out of a side entrance and around the house. The circle of the drive was
empty, the tea-party had gone--and Victoria. Austen assured himself that
her disappearance relieved him: having virtually quarrelled with her
father, conversation would have been awkward; and yet he looked for her.

They found the buggy and Pepper in the paved courtyard of the stables.
As Austen took the reins the secretary looked up at him, his mild blue
eyes burning with an unsuspected fire. He h