ome 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
oughtn't to be upset like that, Mr. Vane, when he comes up here to rest.
I am afraid that you are rather a terrib