He wheeled, and walked over to a cabinet between two of the great windows and stood there examining a collection of fans which his wife had bought at a famous sale in Paris.  Had he suddenly been asked the question, he could not have said whether they were fans or beetles.  And it occurred to Victoria, as her eyes rested on his back, that she ought to be sorry for him—­but wasn’t, somehow.  Perhaps she would be to-morrow.  Mr. Flint looked at the fans, and an obscure glimmering of the truth came to him that instead of administering a severe rebuke to the daughter he believed he had known all his life, he was engaged in a contest with the soul of a woman he had never known.  And the more she confessed, the more she apparently yielded, the more impotent he seemed, the tighter the demon gripped him.  Obstacles, embarrassments, disappointments, he had met early in his life, and he had taken them as they came.  There had followed a long period when his word had been law.  And now, as age came on, and he was meeting with obstacles again, he had lost the magic gift of sweeping them aside; the growing certainty that he was becoming powerless haunted him night and day.  Unbelievably strange, however, it was that the rays of his anger by some subconscious process had hovered from the first about the son of Hilary Vane, and were now, by the trend of event after event, firmly focussed there.

He left the cabinet abruptly and came back to Victoria.

She was standing in the same position.

“You have spared me something,” he said.  “He has apparently undermined me with my own daughter.  He has evidently given you an opinion of me which is his.  I think I can understand why you have not spoken of these —­meetings.”

“It is an inference that I expected,” said Victoria.  Then she lifted her head and looked at him, and again he could not read her expression, for a light burned in her eyes that made them impenetrable to him,—­a light that seemed pitilessly to search out and reveal the dark places and the weak places within him which he himself had not known were there.  Could there be another standard by which men and women were measured and judged?

Mr. Flint snapped his fingers, and turned and began to pace the room.

“It’s all pretty clear,” he said; “there’s no use going into it any farther.  You believe, with the rest of them, that I’m a criminal and deserve the penitentiary.  I don’t care a straw about the others,” he cried, snapping his fingers again.  “And I suppose, if I’d had any sense, I might have expected it from you, too, Victoria—­though you are my daughter.”

He was aware that her eyes followed him.

“How many times have you spoken with Austen Vane?” she asked.

“Once,” he exclaimed; “that was enough.  Once.”

“And he gave you the impression,” she continued slowly, “that he was deceitful, and dishonourable, and a coward? a man who would say things behind your back that he dared not say to your face? who desired reward for himself at any price, and in any manner? a man who would enter your house and seek out your daughter and secretly assail your character?”