, but at
last found something on the floor (where the wind had blown it) which
made her laugh. It was the account of Austen Vane's difficulty with Mr.
Blodgett. Victoria did not know Austen, but she knew that the Honourable
Hilary had a son of that name who had gone West, and this was what
tickled her. She thrust the clipping in the pocket of her linen coat just
as Mr. Pardriff came in.

Her conversation with the editor of the Record proved so entertaining
that she forgot all about the clipping until she had reached Fairview,
and had satisfied a somewhat imperious appetite by a combination of lunch
and afternoon tea. Fairview was the "summer place" of Mr. Augustus P.
Flint, her father, on a shelf of the hills in the town of Tunbridge,
equidistant from Leith and Ripton: and Mr. Flint was the president of the
Imperial Railroad, no less.

Yes, he had once been plain Gus Flint, many years ago, when he used to
fetch the pocket-handkerchiefs of Mr. Isaac D. Worthington of Brampton,
and he was still "Gus" to his friends. Mr. Flint's had been the brain
which had largely conceived and executed the consolidation of
principalities of which the Imperial Railroad was the result and, as
surely as tough metal prevails, Mr. Flint, after many other trials and
errors of weaker stuff, had been elected to the place for which he was so
supremely fitted. We are so used in America to these tremendous rises
that a paragraph will suffice to place Mr. Flint in his Aladdin's palace.
To do him justice, he cared not a fig for the palace, and he would have
been content with the farmhouse under the hill where his gardener lived.
You could not fool Mr. Flint on a horse or a farm, and he knew to a dot
what a railroad was worth by travelling over it. Like his
governor-general and dependent, Mr. Hilary Vane, he had married a wife
who had upset all his calculations. The lady discovered Mr. Flint's
balance in the bank, and had proceeded to use it for her own
glorification, and the irony of it all was that he could defend it from
everybody else. Mrs. Flint spent, and Mr. Flint paid the bills; for the
first ten years protestingly, and after that he gave it up and let her go
her own gait.

She had come from the town of Sharon, in another State, through which Mr.
Flint's railroad also ran, and she had been known as the Rose of that
place. She had begun to rise immediately, with the kite-like adaptability
of the American woman for high altitudes, and the lea