ant date, and the honour of the
bearer's presence was requested. Refreshments would be served, and the
Ripton Band would dispense music. Below, in small print, were minute
directions where to enter, where to hitch your team, and where to go out.

Austen was at a loss to know what fairy godmother had prompted Mr. Crewe
to send him an invitation, the case of the injured horse not having
advanced with noticeable rapidity. Nevertheless, the prospect of the
garden-party dawned radiantly for him above what had hitherto been a
rather gloomy horizon. Since the afternoon he had driven Victoria to the
Hammonds' he had had daily debates with an imaginary man in his own
likeness who, to the detriment of his reading of law, sat across his
table and argued with him. The imaginary man was unprincipled, and had no
dignity, but he had such influence over Austen Vane that he had induced
him to drive twice within sight of Fairview gate, when Austen Vane had
turned round again. The imaginary man was for going to call on her and
letting subsequent events take care of themselves; Austen Vane, had an
uncomfortable quality of reducing a matter first of all to its simplest
terms. He knew that Mr. Flint's views were as fixed, ineradicable, and
unchangeable as an epitaph cut in a granite monument; he felt (as Mr.
Flint had) that their first conversation had been but a forerunner of, a
strife to come between them; and add to this the facts that Mr. Flint was
very rich and Austen Vane poor, that Victoria's friends were not his
friends, and that he had grave doubts that the interest she had evinced
in him sprang from any other incentive than a desire to have
communication with various types of humanity, his hesitation as to
entering Mr. Flint's house was natural enough.

It was of a piece with Mr. Crewe's good fortune of getting what he wanted
that the day of the garden-party was the best that September could do in
that country, which is to say that it was very beautiful. A pregnant
stillness enwrapped the hills, a haze shot with gold dust, like the
filmiest of veils, softened the distant purple and the blue-black shadows
under the pines. Austen awoke from his dream in this enchanted borderland
to find himself in a long line of wagons filled with people in their
Sunday clothes,--the men in black, and the young women in white, with gay
streamers, wending their way through the rear-entrance drive of
Wedderburn, where one of Mr. Crewe's sprucest employ