Victoria remembered the farm now; for Mr. Jabe Jenney, being a person of importance in the town of Leith, had a house commensurate with his estate.  The house was not large, but its dignity was akin to Mr. Jenney’s position:  it was painted a spotless white, and not a shingle or a nail was out of place.  Before it stood the great trees planted by Mr. Jenney’s ancestors, which Victoria and other people had often paused on their drives to admire, and on the hillside was a little, old-fashioned flower garden; lilacs clustered about the small-paned windows, and a bitter-sweet clung to the roof and pillars of the porch.  These details of the place (which she had never before known as Mr. Jenney’s) flashed into Victoria’s mind before she caught sight of the great trees themselves looming against the sombre blue-black of the sky:  the wind, rising fitfully, stirred the leaves with a sound like falling waters, and a great drop fell upon her cheek.  Victoria raised her eyes in alarm, and across the open spaces, toward the hills which piled higher and higher yet against the sky, was a white veil of rain.  She touched with her whip the shoulder of her horse, recalling a farm a quarter of a mile beyond —­she must not be caught here!

More drops followed, and the great trees seemed to reach out to her a protecting shelter.  She spoke to the horse.  Beyond the farm-house, on the other side of the road, was a group of gray, slate-shingled barns, and here two figures confronted her.  One was that of the comfortable, middle-aged Mr. Jenney himself, standing on the threshold of the barn, and laughing heartily, and crying:  “Hang on to him That’s right—­get him by the nose!”

The person thus addressed had led a young horse to water at the spring which bubbled out of a sugar-kettle hard by; and the horse, quivering, had barely touched his nostrils to the water when he reared backward, jerking the halter-rope taut.  Then followed, with bewildering rapidity, a series of manoeuvres on the part of the horse to get away, and on the part of the person to prevent this, and inasmuch as the struggle took place in the middle of the road, Victoria had to stop.  By the time the person had got the horse by the nose,—­shutting off his wind,—­the rain was coming down in earnest.

“Drive right in,” cried Mr. Jenney, hospitably; “you’ll get wet.  Look out, Austen, there’s a lady comin’.  Why, it’s Miss Flint!”

Victoria knew that her face must be on fire.  She felt Austen Vane’s quick glance upon her, but she did not dare look to the right or left as she drove into the barn.  There seemed no excuse for any other course.

“How be you?” said Mr. Jenney; “kind of lucky you happened along here, wahn’t it?  You’d have been soaked before you got to Harris’s.  How be you?  I ain’t seen you since that highfalutin party up to Crewe’s.”

“It’s very kind of you to let me come in, Mr. Jenney.”

“But I have a rain-coat and a boot, and—­I really ought to be going on.”