with such telling effect that when it was merged into the one Imperial Railroad, its stockholders —­to the admiration of financiers—­were guaranteed ten per cent.  It was, indeed, rumoured that Hilary drew the Act of Consolidation itself.  At any rate, he was too valuable an opponent to neglect, and after a certain interval of time Mr. Vane became chief counsel in the State for the Imperial Railroad, on which dizzy height we now behold him.  And he found, by degrees, that he had no longer time for private practice.

It is perhaps gratuitous to add that the Honourable Hilary Vane was a man of convictions.  In politics he would have told you—­with some vehemence, if you seemed to doubt—­that he was a Republican.  Treason to party he regarded with a deep-seated abhorrence, as an act for which a man should be justly outlawed.  If he were in a mellow mood, with the right quantity of Honey Dew tobacco under his tongue, he would perhaps tell you why he was a Republican, if he thought you worthy of his confidence.  He believed in the gold standard, for one thing; in the tariff (left unimpaired in its glory) for another, and with a wave of his hand would indicate the prosperity of the nation which surrounded him,—­a prosperity too sacred to tamper with.

One article of his belief, and in reality the chief article, Mr. Vane would not mention to you.  It was perhaps because he had never formulated the article for himself.  It might be called a faith in the divine right of Imperial Railroads to rule, but it was left out of the verbal creed.  This is far from implying hypocrisy to Mr. Vane.  It was his foundation-rock and too sacred for light conversation.  When he allowed himself to be bitter against various “young men with missions” who had sprung up in various States of the Union, so-called purifiers of politics, he would call them the unsuccessful with a grievance, and recommend to them the practice of charity, forbearance, and other Christian virtues.  Thank God, his State was not troubled with such.

In person Mr. Hilary Vane was tall, with a slight stoop to his shoulders, and he wore the conventional double-breasted black coat, which reached to his knees, and square-toed congress boots.  He had a Puritan beard, the hawk-like Vane nose, and a twinkling eye that spoke of a sense of humour and a knowledge of the world.  In short, he was no man’s fool, and on occasions had been more than a match for certain New York lawyers with national reputations.

It is rare, in this world of trouble, that such an apparently ideal and happy state of existence is without a canker.  And I have left the revelation of the canker to the last.  Ripton knew it was there, Camden Street knew it, and Mr. Vane’s acquaintances throughout the State; but nobody ever spoke of it.  Euphrasia shed over it the only tears she had known since Sarah Austen died, and some of these blotted the only letters she wrote.  Hilary Vane did not shed tears, but his friends suspected that his heart-strings were torn, and pitied him.  Hilary Vane fiercely resented pity, and that was why they did not speak of it.  This trouble of his was the common point on which he and Euphrasia touched, and they touched only to quarrel.  Let us out with it—­Hilary Vane had a wild son, whose name was Austen.