e."

The Honour could see through a millstone with a hole in it. The effect of
Austen's assertion on him was a declaration that the mission of the one
was to tear down what the other had so laboriously built up. And yet a
growing dread of Hilary Vane's had been the loneliness of declining years
in that house should Austen leave it again, never to return.

"I knew you had this Meader business in mind," he said. "I knew you had
fanciful notions about--some things. Never told you I didn't want you
here, did I?"

"No," said Austen, "but--"

Would have told you if I hadn't wanted you--wouldn't I?"

"I hope so, Judge," said Austen, who understood something of the feeling
which underlay this brusqueness. That knowledge made matters all the
harder for him.

"It was your mother's house--you're entitled to that, anyway," said the
Honourable Hilary, "but what I want to know is, why you didn't advise
that eternal fool of a Meader to accept what we offered him. You'll never
get a county jury to give as much."

"I did advise him to accept it," answered Austen.

"What's the matter with him?" the Honourable Hilary demanded.

"Well, judge, if you really want my opinion, an honest farmer like Meader
is suspicious of any corporation which has such zealous and loyal
retainers as Ham Tooting and Brush Bascom." And Austen thought with a
return of the pang which had haunted him at intervals throughout the
afternoon, that he might almost have added to these names that of Hilary
Vane. Certainly Zeb Meader had not spared his father.

"Life," observed the Honourable Hilary, unconsciously using a phrase from
the 'Book of Arguments,' "is a survival of the fittest."

"How do you define 'the fittest?'" asked Austen. "Are they the men who
have the not unusual and certainly not exalted gift of getting money from
their fellow creatures by the use of any and all weapons that may be at
hand? who believe the acquisition of wealth to be exempt from the
practice of morality? Is Mr. Flint your example of the fittest type to
exist and survive, or Gladstone or Wilberforce or Emerson or Lincoln?"

"Emerson!" cried the Honourable Hilary, the name standing out in red
letters before his eyes. He had never read a line of the philosopher's
writings, not even the charge to "hitch your wagon to a star" (not in the
"Book of Arguments"). Sarah Austen had read Emerson in the woods, and her
son's question sounded so like the unintelligible but unanswerable
fl