all them the unsuccessful with a grievance, and
recommend to them the practice of charity, forbearance, and other
Christian virtues. Thank God, his State was not troubled with such.

In person Mr. Hilary Vane was tall, with a slight stoop to his shoulders,
and he wore the conventional double-breasted black coat, which reached to
his knees, and square-toed congress boots. He had a Puritan beard, the
hawk-like Vane nose, and a twinkling eye that spoke of a sense of humour
and a knowledge of the world. In short, he was no man's fool, and on
occasions had been more than a match for certain New York lawyers with
national reputations.

It is rare, in this world of trouble, that such an apparently ideal and
happy state of existence is without a canker. And I have left the
revelation of the canker to the last. Ripton knew it was there, Camden
Street knew it, and Mr. Vane's acquaintances throughout the State; but
nobody ever spoke of it. Euphrasia shed over it the only tears she had
known since Sarah Austen died, and some of these blotted the only letters
she wrote. Hilary Vane did not shed tears, but his friends suspected that
his heart-strings were torn, and pitied him. Hilary Vane fiercely
resented pity, and that was why they did not speak of it. This trouble of
his was the common point on which he and Euphrasia touched, and they
touched only to quarrel. Let us out with it--Hilary Vane had a wild son,
whose name was Austen.

Euphrasia knew that in his secret soul Mr. Vane attributed this wildness,
and what he was pleased to designate as profligacy, to the Austen blood.
And Euphrasia resented it bitterly. Sarah Austen had been a young, elfish
thing when he married her,--a dryad, the elderly and learned Mrs. Tredway
had called her. Mr Vane had understood her about as well as he would have
understood Mary, Queen of Scots, if he had been married to that lady.
Sarah Austen had a wild, shy beauty, startled, alert eyes like an animal,
and rebellious black hair that curled about her ears and gave her a
faun-like appearance. With a pipe and the costume of Rosalind she would
have been perfect. She had had a habit of running off for the day into
the hills with her son, and the conventions of Ripton had been to her as
so many defunct blue laws. During her brief married life there had been
periods of defiance from her lasting a week, when she would not speak to
Hilary or look at him, and these periods would be followed by violent
spells