“Good day, Mr. Vane,” he said; “Mr. Freeman will help you to find your horse.”

The thin secretary bowed, and before he reached the door into the passage Mr. Flint had opened another at the back of the room and stepped out on a close-cropped lawn flooded with afternoon sunlight.  In the passage Austen perceived a chair, and in the chair was seated patiently none other than Mr. Brush Bascom—­political Duke of Putnam.  Mr. Bascom’s little agate eyes glittered in the dim light.

“Hello, Austen,” he said, “since when have you took to comin’ here?”

“It’s a longer trip from Putnam than from Ripton, Brush,” said Austen, and passed on, leaving Mr. Bascom with a puzzled mind.  Something very like a smile passed over Mr. Freeman’s face as he led the way silently out of a side entrance and around the house.  The circle of the drive was empty, the tea-party had gone—­and Victoria.  Austen assured himself that her disappearance relieved him:  having virtually quarrelled with her father, conversation would have been awkward; and yet he looked for her.

They found the buggy and Pepper in the paved courtyard of the stables.  As Austen took the reins the secretary looked up at him, his mild blue eyes burning with an unsuspected fire.  He held out his hand.

“I want to congratulate you,” he said.

“What for?” asked Austen, taking the hand in some embarrassment.

“For speaking like a man,” said the secretary, and he turned on his heel and left him.

This strange action, capping, as it did, a stranger experience, gave Austen food for thought as he let Pepper take his own pace down the trade’s road.  Presently he got back into the main drive where it clung to a steep, forest-covered side hill, when his attention was distracted by the sight of a straight figure in white descending amidst the foliage ahead.  His instinctive action was to pull Pepper down to a walk, scarcely analyzing his motives; then he had time, before reaching the spot where their paths would cross, to consider and characteristically to enjoy the unpropitious elements arrayed against a friendship with Victoria Flint.

She halted on a flagstone of the descending path some six feet above the roadway, and stood expectant.  The Rose of Sharon, five and twenty years before, would have been coy—­would have made believe to have done it by accident.  But the Rose of Sharon, with all her beauty, would have had no attraction for Austen Vane.  Victoria had much of her mother’s good looks, the figure of a Diana, and her clothes were of a severity and correctness in keeping with her style; they merely added to the sum total of the effect upon Austen.  Of course he stopped the buggy immediately beneath her, and her first question left him without any breath.  No woman he had ever known seized the essentials as she did.

“What have you been doing to my father?” she asked.

“Why?” exclaimed Austen.