Mr. Crewe's Career, Book I.

e carpet with her own hands, Hilary Vane went about his business with no apparent lack of diligence. But he was meditating. He had many times liste

t? To tell the truth, Hilary wanted a calf, and yet to have one (in spite o

herefore a fatted calf was likely to be the first of many follies which he (Hilary) would live to regret. No, he would deal with justice. How he deal

summer residents. Victoria probably stopped at every house in Leith, and searched them with characteristic vigour and lack of ceremony, sometimes entering by the side door, and sometimes by the front, and caring very little whether the owners were at home or not. Mr. Humphrey Crewe discovered her in a boa-stall at Wedderburn,-as his place was called,-for it made

sentee. Mr. Crewe laughed as she drove away. He had a chemical quality of turning invidious remarks into compli

ial chair and read a great deal of uninteresting matter, but at last found something on the floor (where the wind had blown it) which made her laugh. It was the account of Austen Vane's difficulty with Mr. Blodgett. Victor

tisfied a somewhat imperious appetite by a combination of lunch and afternoon tea. Fairview was the "summer place" of Mr. Augustus P. Flint, her father

n elected to the place for which he was so supremely fitted. We are so used in America to these tremendous rises that a paragraph will suffice to place Mr. Flint in his Aladdin's palace. To do him justice, he cared not a fig for the palace, and he would have been content with the farmhouse under the hill where his gardener lived. You could not fool Mr. Flint on a horse or a farm, and he knew to a dot what a railroad was worth by travelling ov

high altitudes, and the leaden weight of the husband at the end of the tail was as nothing to her. She had begun it all by the study of people in hotels while Mr. Flint was closeted with officials and directors. By dint of minute observation an

another generation, but might almost have been judged of another race than her parents. The things for which her mother had striven she took for granted, and thought of

er, and then he was nearly always closeted with a secretary and two stenographers and a long-distance telephone in two plain little rooms at the back of the house. And Mr. Hilary Vane was often in consultation with him, as he was on the present occasion when Vic

er father, kindly if res

"I went to Avalon this morning and bo

aguely. "But never mind. Tell Mr

long ago discovered the secret of the Honey Dew, knew that he was rollin

e?" She had got this by feminine arts out of Mr. Paul Pardriff, to

when he was surprised and displeased, as though some

d me that," said Mr. Flint. "I didn

toria, "but I'd like to

she demande

t gentleman. "I never heard o

bly recover,"

ng in vain to suppress his

t, Victoria," he said, but his glance

it?" she asked,

the table and glancing at Victoria with vague disapproval. Mr. Flint read it and ga

it?" asked Victoria. "I'd be

oed Mr. Vane, grim

do you mean?"

According to that clipping, he's punished a man who richly deser

window, and was not aware of the fact that Victoria made a little face at him as she left the room. The young are not always imp

ess at Ripton and grinned delightedly at the gentlemen who made the station their headquarters about train time. They were privately disappointed that the gray felt hat, although broad-brimmed, was not a sombrero, and the respectable, loose-fitting suit of clothes was not of buckskin with tassels on the trousers; and likewise that he came without the cartridge be

wsy summer afternoon, and he stopped under the well-remembered maples before the house and gazed at it long and tenderly; even at the windows of that room-open now for the first time in years-where he had served so many sentences of imprisonment. Then he went cautiously around by the side and looked in at

ay at last and staring at him with the only complete ap

you expect

t hide; "it's got all the same pictures in, your mother's pictures, and

the apron-strings, "how about the Judge?" It was

?" demanded Eup

ing," answered Austen, "and he ma

him," cried Euphrasia. "It wouldn't ta

t the stable door. In the absence of Luke, the hired man, the chief counsel for the railroad was wont to put up the horse himself, and he

nd now surged up a dryad-like memory which had troubled him many a wakeful night, of startled, appealing eyes that sought his in vain, and of the son she had left him flinging himself into his arms in the face of chastisement. For the moment Hilary Vane, under this t

old Judge,

ise his eyes a little; he had forgotten how tall Austen was. Strange emotions, unbidden and unwelcome, ran riot in his breast; and Hilary

ich he did with such deftness and celerity that he had the horse unharnessed and in the stall in a twinkling, and had hauled the buggy through the stable door, th

" said the Honourable Hilary, as hi

truth was I wanted to

t with absolute disple

Blodgett?

ou heard about th

dn't. Nothing in yo

er and the boys liked it pretty well, but I didn't

raged to discover that his son was modestly deprecating an achievement inste

ssful," said Austen. "If

ave heard of it

is Blodgett tried to k

able H

er understood why he didn't. He's

on a bucket and carefully prepared a piece

rom justice if you were acting

runs the Pepper County machine for the railroad out there. I'd been wanting to come

is affair start?

d I caught him. I told him what I thought of him, a

shot him,

gh to hit him fir

m, the Honourable Hilary ex

you hit him

ne usually had. But he made no comment. It is perhaps not too much to say that he would have been distinctly disappointed had it been otherwise. There was Austen's favourite