The Honourable Hilary’s business was to deal with men, and by reason of his ability in so doing he had made a success in life.  He could judge motives more than passably well, and play upon weaknesses.  But he left Austen’s presence that morning vaguely uneasy, with a sense of having received from his own son an initial defeat at a game of which he was a master.  Under the excuse of looking up some precedents, he locked his doors to all comers for two hours, and paced his room.  At one moment he reproached himself for not having been frank; for not having told Austen roundly that this squeamishness about a pass was unworthy of a strong man of affairs; yes, for not having revealed to him the mysteries of railroad practice from the beginning.  But frankness was not an ingredient of the Honourable Hilary’s nature, and Austen was not the kind of man who would accept a hint and a wink.  Hilary Vane had formless forebodings, and found himself for once in his life powerless to act.

The cost of living in Ripton was not so high that Austen Vane could not afford to keep a horse and buggy.  The horse, which he tended himself, was appropriately called Pepper; Austen had found him in the hills, and he was easily the finest animal in Ripton:  so good, in fact, that Mr. Humphrey Crewe (who believed he had an eye for horses) had peremptorily hailed Austen from a motorcar and demanded the price, as was Mr. Crewe’s wont when he saw a thing he desired.  He had been somewhat surprised and not inconsiderably offended by the brevity and force of the answer which he had received.

On the afternoon of the summer’s day in which Austen had the conversation with his father just related, Pepper was trotting at a round clip through the soft and shady wood roads toward the town of Tunbridge; the word “town” being used in the New England sense, as a piece of territory about six miles by six.  The fact that automobiles full of laughing people from Leith hummed by occasionally made no apparent difference to Pepper, who knew only the master hand on the reins; the reality that the wood roads were climbing great hills the horse did not seem to feel.  Pepper knew every lane and by-path within twenty miles of Ripton, and exhibited such surprise as a well-bred horse may when he was slowed down at length and turned into a hard, blue-stone driveway under a strange granite arch with the word “Fairview” cut in Gothic letters above it, and two great lamps in wrought-iron brackets at the sides.  It was Austen who made a note of the gratings over the drains, and of the acres of orderly forest in a mysterious and seemingly enchanted realm.  Intimacy with domains was new to him, and he began to experience an involuntary feeling of restraint which was new to him likewise, and made him chafe in spite of himself.  The estate seemed to be the visible semblance of a power which troubled him.