eld out his hand.

"I want to congratulate you," he said.

"What for?" asked Austen, taking the hand in some embarrassment.

"For speaking like a man," said the secretary, and he turned on his heel
and left him.

This strange action, capping, as it did, a stranger experience, gave
Austen food for thought as he let Pepper take his own pace down the
trade's road. Presently he got back into the main drive where it clung
to a steep, forest-covered side hill, when his attention was distracted
by the sight of a straight figure in white descending amidst the
foliage ahead. His instinctive action was to pull Pepper down to a walk,
scarcely analyzing his motives; then he had time, before reaching the
spot where their paths would cross, to consider and characteristically
to enjoy the unpropitious elements arrayed against a friendship with
Victoria Flint.

She halted on a flagstone of the descending path some six feet above the
roadway, and stood expectant. The Rose of Sharon, five and twenty years
before, would have been coy--would have made believe to have done it by
accident. But the Rose of Sharon, with all her beauty, would have had
no attraction for Austen Vane. Victoria had much of her mother's good
looks, the figure of a Diana, and her clothes were of a severity and
correctness in keeping with her style; they merely added to the
sum total of the effect upon Austen. Of course he stopped the buggy
immediately beneath her, and her first question left him without any
breath. No woman he had ever known seized the essentials as she did.

"What have you been doing to my father?" she asked.

"Why?" exclaimed Austen.

"Because he's in such a bad temper," said Victoria. "You must have put
him in it. It can't be possible that you came all the way up here to
quarrel with him. Nobody ever dares to quarrel with him."

"I didn't come up to quarrel with him," said Austen.

"What's the trouble?" asked Victoria.

The humour of this question was too much for him, and he laughed.
Victoria's eyes laughed a little, but there was a pucker in her
forehead.

"Won't you tell me?" she demanded, "or must I get it out of him?"

"I am afraid," said Austen, slowly, "that you must get it out of him--if
he hasn't forgotten it."

"Forgotten it, dear old soul!" cried Victoria. "I met him just now
and tried to make him look at the new Guernseys, and he must have been
disturbed quite a good deal when he's cross as a bear to me. He really
oug