McClintock bought the Mitchell House in the seventies—­boys still continuing to be boyish—­and there, a decade later, his wife died, childless.

McClintock disposed of his takings unobserved, holding Mitchell House only, and slipped away to New York or elsewhere.  The rents of Mitchell House were absorbed by a shadowy, almost mythical agent, whose name you always forgot until you hunted up the spidery signature on the receipts given by the bank for your rent money.

Except for a curious circumstance connected with Mitchell House, McClintock had been quite forgotten of Vesper and Abingdon.  The great house was much in demand as a summer residence; those old oak-walled rooms were spacious and comfortable, if not artistic; the house was admirably kept up.  It was in the most desirable neighborhood; there was fishing and boating; the situation was “sightly.”  We borrow the last word from the hill folk, the presentee landlords; the producers, or, to put it quite bluntly, the workers.

As the years slipped by, it crept into common knowledge that not every one could obtain a lease of Mitchell House.  Applicants, Vesperian or “foreigners,” were kept waiting; almost as if the invisible agent were examining into their eligibility.  And it began to be observed that leaseholders were invariably light, frivolous, pleasure-loving people, such as kept the big house crowded with youth and folly, to company youth of its own.  Such lessees were like to make agriculture a mockery; the Mitchell Place, as a farm, became a hissing, and a proverb, and an astonishment:  a circumstance so singularly at variance with remembered thrift of the reputed owner as to keep green that owner’s name.  Nor was that all.  As youth became mature and wise, in the sad heartrending fashion youth has, or flitted to new hearths, in that other heartbreaking way of youth, it was noted that leases were not to be renewed on any terms; and the new tenants, in turn, were ever such light and unthrift folk as the old, always with tall sons and gay daughters—­as if the mythical agent or his ghostly principal had set apart that old house to mirth and joy and laughter, to youth and love.  It was remembered then, on certain struggling hill farms, that old McClintock had been childless; and certain hill babies were cuddled the closer for that.

Then, thirty years later, or forty—­some such matter—­McClintock slipped back to Vesper unheralded—­very many times a millionaire; incidentally a hopeless invalid, sentenced for life to a wheeled chair; Vesper’s most successful citizen.

Silent, uncomplaining, unapproachable, and grim, he kept to his rooms in the Iroquois, oldest of Vesper’s highly modern hotels; or was wheeled abroad by his one attendant, who was valet, confidant, factotum, and friend—­Cornelius Van Lear, withered, parchment-faced, and brown, strikingly like Rameses II as to appearance and garrulity.  It was to Van Lear that Vesper owed the known history of those forty years of McClintock’s.  Closely questioned, the trusted confidant had once yielded to cajolery.