What was his side of it?  He had never told her, and she respected his motives—­yet, what was his side?  Fresh from the inevitably deep impressions which her father’s personality had stamped upon her, she wondered if Austen could cope with the argument before which she had been so helpless.

The fact that she made of each of these two men the embodiment of a different and opposed idea did not occur to Victoria until that afternoon.  Unconsciously, each had impersonated the combatants in a struggle which was going on in her own breast.  Her father himself, instinctively, had chosen Austen Vane for his antagonist without knowing that she had an interest in him.  Would Mr. Flint ever know?  Or would the time come when she would be forced to take a side?  The blood mounted to her temples as she put the question from her.

CHAPTER XIX

MR. JABE JENNEY ENTERTAINS

Mr. Flint had dropped the subject with his last remark, nor had Victoria attempted to pursue it.  Bewildered and not a little depressed (a new experience for her), she had tried to hide her feelings.  He, too, was harassed and tired, and she had drawn him away from the bench and through the pine woods to the pastures to look at his cattle and the model barn he was building for them.  At half-past three, in her runabout, she had driven him to the East Tunbridge station, where he had taken the train for New York.  He had waved her a good-by from the platform, and smiled:  and for a long time, as she drove through the silent roads, his words and his manner remained as vivid as though he were still by her side.  He was a man who had fought and conquered, and who fought on for the sheer love of it.

It was a blue day in the hill country.  At noon the clouds had crowned Sawanec—­a sure sign of rain; the rain had come and gone, a June downpour, and the overcast sky lent (Victoria fancied) to the country-side a new atmosphere.  The hills did not look the same.  It was the kind of a day when certain finished country places are at their best—­or rather seem best to express their meaning; a day for an event; a day set strangely apart with an indefinable distinction.  Victoria recalled such days in her youth when weddings or garden-parties had brought canopies into service, or news had arrived to upset the routine of the household.  Raindrops silvered the pines, and the light winds shook them down on the road in a musical shower.

Victoria was troubled, as she drove, over a question which had recurred to her many times since her talk that morning:  had she been hypocritical in not telling her father that she had seen more of Austen Vane than she had implied by her silence?  For many years Victoria had chosen her own companions; when the custom had begun, her mother had made a protest which Mr. Flint had answered with a laugh; he thought Victoria’s judgment better than his wife’s.  Ever since that time the Rose of Sharon had taken