Yes, he had once been plain Gus Flint, many years ago, when he used to fetch the pocket-handkerchiefs of Mr. Isaac D. Worthington of Brampton, and he was still “Gus” to his friends.  Mr. Flint’s had been the brain which had largely conceived and executed the consolidation of principalities of which the Imperial Railroad was the result and, as surely as tough metal prevails, Mr. Flint, after many other trials and errors of weaker stuff, had been elected to the place for which he was so supremely fitted.  We are so used in America to these tremendous rises that a paragraph will suffice to place Mr. Flint in his Aladdin’s palace.  To do him justice, he cared not a fig for the palace, and he would have been content with the farmhouse under the hill where his gardener lived.  You could not fool Mr. Flint on a horse or a farm, and he knew to a dot what a railroad was worth by travelling over it.  Like his governor-general and dependent, Mr. Hilary Vane, he had married a wife who had upset all his calculations.  The lady discovered Mr. Flint’s balance in the bank, and had proceeded to use it for her own glorification, and the irony of it all was that he could defend it from everybody else.  Mrs. Flint spent, and Mr. Flint paid the bills; for the first ten years protestingly, and after that he gave it up and let her go her own gait.

She had come from the town of Sharon, in another State, through which Mr. Flint’s railroad also ran, and she had been known as the Rose of that place.  She had begun to rise immediately, with the kite-like adaptability of the American woman for high altitudes, and the leaden weight of the husband at the end of the tail was as nothing to her.  She had begun it all by the study of people in hotels while Mr. Flint was closeted with officials and directors.  By dint of minute observation and reasoning powers and unflagging determination she passed rapidly through several strata, and had made a country place out of her husband’s farm in Tunbridge, so happily and conveniently situated near Leith.  In winter they lived on Fifth Avenue.

One daughter alone had halted, for a minute period, this progress, and this daughter was Victoria—­named by her mother.  Victoria was now twenty-one, and was not only of another generation, but might almost have been judged of another race than her parents.  The things for which her mother had striven she took for granted, and thought of them not at all, and she had by nature that simplicity and astonishing frankness of manner and speech which was once believed to be an exclusive privilege of duchesses.

To return to Fairview.  Victoria, after sharing her five o’clock luncheon with her dogs, went to seek her father, for the purpose (if it must be told) of asking him for a cheque.  Mr. Flint was at Fairview on the average of two days out of the week during the summer, and then he was nearly always closeted with a secretary and two stenographers and a long-distance telephone in two plain little rooms at the back of the house.  And Mr. Hilary Vane was often in consultation with him, as he was on the present occasion when Victoria flung open the door.  At sight of Mr. Vane she halted suddenly on the threshold, and a gleam of mischief came into her eye as she thrust her hand into her coat pocket.  The two regarded her with the detached air of men whose thread of thought has been broken.