e room in
the far corridor to the great man's own office.

These visitors of the elder Mr. Vane's, as has been before hinted, were
not all clients. Without burdening the reader too early with a treatise
on the fabric of a system, suffice it to say that something was
continually going on that was not law; and gentlemen came and went--fat
and thin, sharp-eyed and red-faced--who were neither clients nor lawyers.
These were really secretive gentlemen, though most of them had a
hail-fellow-well-met manner and a hearty greeting, but when they talked
to the Honourable Hilary it was with doors shut, and even then they sat
very close to his ear. Many of them preferred now to wait in Austen's
office instead of the anteroom, and some of them were not so cautious
with the son of Hilary Vane that they did not let drop certain
observations to set him thinking. He had a fanciful if somewhat facetious
way of calling them by feudal titles which made them grin.

"How is the Duke of Putnam this morning?" he would ask of the gentleman
of whom the Ripton Record would frequently make the following
announcement: "Among the prominent residents of Putnam County in town
this week was the Honourable Brush Bascom."

The Honourable Brush and many of his associates, barons and earls, albeit
the shrewdest of men, did not know exactly how to take the son of Hilary
Vane. This was true also of the Honourable Hilary himself, who did not
wholly appreciate the humour in Austen's parallel of the feudal system.
Although Austen had set up for himself, there were many ways--not legal
--in which the son might have been helpful to the father, but the
Honourable Hilary hesitated, for some unformulated reason, to make use of
him; and the consequence was that Mr. Hamilton Tooting and other young
men of a hustling nature in the Honourable Hilary's office found that
Austen's advent did not tend greatly to lighten a certain class of their
labours. In fact, father and son were not much nearer in spirit than when
ode had been in Pepper County and the other in Ripton. Caution and an
instinct which senses obstacles are characteristics of gentlemen in Mr.
Vane's business.

So two years passed,--years liberally interspersed with expeditions into
the mountains and elsewhere, and nights spent in the company of Tom
Gaylord and others. During this period Austen was more than once assailed
by the temptation to return to the free life of Pepper County, Mr.
Blodgett having com