onourable Hilary. Another result
was that Austen and a Tom Gaylord came back to Ripton on a long
suspension, which, rumour said, would have been expulsion if Hilary were
not a trustee. Tom Gaylord was proud of suspension in such company. More
of him later. He was the son of old Tom Gaylord, who owned more lumber
than any man in the State, and whom Hilary Vane believed to be the
receptacle of all the vices.

Eventually Austen went back and graduated--not summa cum laude, honesty
compels me to add. Then came the inevitable discussion, and to please his
father he went to the Harvard Law School for two years. At the end of
that time, instead of returning to Ripton, a letter had come from him
with the postmark of a Western State, where he had fled with a classmate
who owned ranch. Evidently the worldly consideration to be derived from
conformity counted little with Austen Vane. Money was a medium only--not
an end. He was in the saddle all day, with nothing but the horizon to
limit him; he loved his father, and did not doubt his father's love for
him, and he loved Euphrasia. He could support himself, but he must see
life. The succeeding years brought letters and quaint, useless presents
to both the occupants of the lonely house,--Navajo blankets and Indian
jeweler and basket-work,--and Austen little knew how carefully these were
packed away and surreptitiously gazed at from time to time. But to Hilary
the Western career was a disgrace, and such meagre reports of it as came
from other sources than Austen tended only to confirm him in this
opinion.

It was commonly said of Mr. Paul Pardriff that not a newspaper fell from
the press that he did not have a knowledge of its contents. Certain it
was that Mr. Pardriff made a specialty of many kinds of knowledge,
political and otherwise, and, the information he could give--if he chose
--about State and national affairs was of a recondite and cynical nature
that made one wish to forget about the American flag. Mr. Pardriff was
under forty, and with these gifts many innocent citizens of Ripton
naturally wondered why the columns of his newspaper, the Ripton Record,
did not more closely resemble the spiciness of his talk in the office of
Gales' Hotel. The columns contained, instead, such efforts as essays on a
national flower and the abnormal size of the hats of certain great men,
notably Andrew Jackson; yes, and the gold standard; and in times of
political stress they were devoted to a