ere a Law behind these actions of mother and
son which he had persisted in denouncing as vagaries? Austen was a man:
a man, Hilary could not but see, who had the respect of his fellows,
whose judgment and talents were becoming recognized. Was it possible
that he, Hilary Vane, could have been one of those referred to by the
Preacher? During the week which had passed since Austen's departure the
house in Hanover Street had been haunted for Hilary. The going of his
son had not left a mere void,--that would have been pain enough. Ghosts
were there, ghosts which he could but dimly feel and see, and more than
once, in the long evenings, he had taken to the streets to avoid them.

In that week Hilary's fear of meeting his son in the street or in the
passages of the building had been equalled by a yearning to see him.
Every morning, at the hour Austen was wont to drive Pepper to the Ripton
House stables across the square, Hilary had contrived to be standing
near his windows--a little back, and out of sight. And--stranger
still!--he had turned from these glimpses to the reports of the
Honourable Brush Bascom and his associates with a distaste he had never
felt before.

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 ha