the progress of which one chair had been broken. Young Tom
thought it was time to fight the railroad, and perceived in Austen the
elements of a rebel leader. Austen had undertaken to throw young Tom out
of a front window, which was a large, old-fashioned one,--and after
Herculean efforts had actually got him on the ledge, when something in
the street caught his eye and made him desist abruptly. The something was
the vision of a young woman in a brown linen suit seated in a runabout
and driving a horse almost as handsome as Pepper.

When the delegation, after exhausting their mental and physical powers of
persuasion, had at length taken their departure in disgust, Austen opened
mechanically a letter which had very much the appearance of an
advertisement, and bearing a one-cent stamp. It announced that a
garden-party would take place at Wedderburn, the home of the Honourable
Humphrey Crewe, at a not very distant date, and the honour of the
bearer's presence was requested. Refreshments would be served, and the
Ripton Band would dispense music. Below, in small print, were minute
directions where to enter, where to hitch your team, and where to go out.

Austen was at a loss to know what fairy godmother had prompted Mr. Crewe
to send him an invitation, the case of the injured horse not having
advanced with noticeable rapidity. Nevertheless, the prospect of the
garden-party dawned radiantly for him above what had hitherto been a
rather gloomy horizon. Since the afternoon he had driven Victoria to the
Hammonds' he had had daily debates with an imaginary man in his own
likeness who, to the detriment of his reading of law, sat across his
table and argued with him. The imaginary man was unprincipled, and had no
dignity, but he had such influence over Austen Vane that he had induced
him to drive twice within sight of Fairview gate, when Austen Vane had
turned round again. The imaginary man was for going to call on her and
letting subsequent events take care of themselves; Austen Vane, had an
uncomfortable quality of reducing a matter first of all to its simplest
terms. He knew that Mr. Flint's views were as fixed, ineradicable, and
unchangeable as an epitaph cut in a granite monument; he felt (as Mr.
Flint had) that their first conversation had been but a forerunner of, a
strife to come between them; and add to this the facts that Mr. Flint was
very rich and Austen Vane poor, that Victoria's friends were not his
friends, and that h