usual about him, something
clean cut."

"I've heard other people say so," Victoria replied. For the first time
since she had known him, praise of Austen was painful to her. What was
this curious attraction that roused the interest of all who came in
contact with him? The doctor had it, Mr. Redbrook, Jabe Jenney,--even
Hamilton Tooting, she remembered. And he attracted women as well as men
--it must be so. Certainly her own interest in him--a man beyond the
radius of her sphere--and their encounters had been strange enough! And
must she go on all her life hearing praises of him? Of one thing she was
sure--who was not?--that Austen Vane had a future. He was the type of man
which is inevitably impelled into places of trust.

Manly men, as a rule, do not understand women. They humour them blindly,
seek to comfort them--if they weep--with caresses, laugh with them if
they have leisure, and respect their curious and unaccountable moods by
keeping out of the way. Such a husband was Arthur Rangely destined to
make; a man who had seen any number of women and understood none,--as
wondrous mechanisms. He had merely acquired the faculty of appraisal,
although this does not mean that he was incapable of falling in love.

Mr. Rangely could not account for the sudden access of gayety in
Victoria's manner as they drove to Fairview through the darkness, nor did
he try. He took what the gods sent him, and was thankful. When he reached
Fairview he was asked to dinner, as he could not possibly get back to the
Inn in time. Mr. Flint had gone to Sumner with the engineers, leaving
orders to be met at the East Tunbridge station at ten; and Mrs. Flint,
still convalescent, had dined in her sitting room. Victoria sat opposite
her guest in the big dining room, and Mr. Rangely pronounced the occasion
decidedly jolly. He had, he proclaimed, with the exception of Mr. Vane's
deplorable accident, never spent a better day in his life.

Victoria wondered at her own spirits, which were feverish, as she
listened to transatlantic gossip about girls she had known who had
married Mr. Rangely's friends, and stories of Westminster and South
Africa, and certain experiences of Mr. Rangely's at other places than
Leith on the American continent, which he had grown sufficiently
confidential to relate. At times, lifting her eyes to him as he sat
smoking after dinner on the other side of the library fire, she almost
doubted his existence. He had come into her life