With some such thoughts as these Hilary Vane turned into the last straight stretch of the avenue that led to Fairview House, with its red and white awnings gleaming in the morning sun.  On the lawn, against a white and purple mass of lilacs and the darker background of pines, a straight and infinitely graceful figure in white caught his eye and held it.  He recognized Victoria.  She wore a simple summer gown, the soft outline of its flounces mingling subtly with the white clusters behind her.  She turned her head at the sound of the wheels and looked at him; the distance was not too great for a bow, but Hilary did not bow.  Something in her face deterred him from this act,—­something which he himself did not understand or define.  He sought to pronounce the incident negligible.  What was the girl, or her look, to him?  And yet (he found himself strangely thinking) he had read in her eyes a trace of the riddle which had been relentlessly pursuing him; there was an odd relation in her look to that of Sarah Austen.  During the long years he had been coming to Fairview, even before the new house was built, when Victoria was in pinafores, he had never understood her.  When she was a child, he had vaguely recognized in her a spirit antagonistic to his own, and her sayings had had a disconcerting ring.  And now this simple glance of hers had troubled him—­only more definitely.

It was a new experience for the Honourable Hilary to go into a business meeting with his faculties astray.  Absently he rang the stable bell, surrendered his horse, and followed a footman to the retired part of the house occupied by the railroad president.  Entering the oak-bound sanctum, he crossed it and took a seat by the window, merely nodding to Mr. Flint, who was dictating a letter.  Mr. Flint took his time about the letter, but when it was finished he dismissed the stenographer with an impatient and powerful wave of the hand—­as though brushing the man bodily out of the room.  Remaining motionless until the door had closed, Mr. Flint turned abruptly and fixed his eyes on the contemplative figure of his chief counsel.

“Well?” he said.

“Well, Flint,” answered the Honourable Hilary.

“Well,” said Mr. Flint, “that bridge over Maple River has got loosened up so by the freshet that we have to keep freight cars on it to hold it down, and somebody is trying to make trouble by writing a public letter to the Railroad Commission, and calling attention to the head-on collision at Barker’s Station.”

“Well,” replied the Honourable Hilary, again, “that won’t have any influence on the Railroad Commission.”

“No,” said Mr. Flint, “but it all goes to increase this confounded public sentiment that’s in the air, like smallpox.  Another jackass pretends to have kept a table of the through trains on the Sumsic division, and says they’ve averaged forty-five minutes late at Edmundton.  He says the through express made the run faster thirty years ago.”