scom's little agate
eyes glittered in the dim light.

"Hello, Austen," he said, "since when have you took to comin' here?"

"It's a longer trip from Putnam than from Ripton, Brush," said Austen,
and passed on, leaving Mr. Bascom with a puzzled mind. Something very
like a smile passed over Mr. Freeman's face as he led the way silently
out of a side entrance and around the house. The circle of the drive was
empty, the tea-party had gone--and Victoria. Austen assured himself that
her disappearance relieved him: having virtually quarrelled with her
father, conversation would have been awkward; and yet he looked for her.

They found the buggy and Pepper in the paved courtyard of the stables. As
Austen took the reins the secretary looked up at him, his mild blue eyes
burning with an unsuspected fire. He held out his hand.

"I want to congratulate you," he said.

"What for?" asked Austen, taking the hand in some 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.

"Becaus