“It’s a bargain, Austen,” he said.

“I don’t mind telling you now, Judge, that when I left the West I left it for good, provided you and I could live within a decent proximity.  And I ought to add that I always intended going into the law after I’d had a fling.  It isn’t fair to leave you with the impression that this is a sudden determination.  Prodigals don’t become good as quick as all that.”

Ripton caught its breath a second time the day Austen hired a law office, nor did the surprise wholly cease when, in one season, he was admitted to the bar, for the proceeding was not in keeping with the habits and customs of prodigals.  Needless to say, the practice did not immediately begin to pour in, but the little office rarely lacked a visitor, and sometimes had as many as five or six.  There was an irresistible attraction about that room, and apparently very little law read there, though sometimes its occupant arose and pushed the visitors into the hall and locked the door, and opened the window at the top to let the smoke out.  Many of the Honourable Hilary’s callers preferred the little room in the far corridor to the great man’s own office.

These visitors of the elder Mr. Vane’s, as has been before hinted, were not all clients.  Without burdening the reader too early with a treatise on the fabric of a system, suffice it to say that something was continually going on that was not law; and gentlemen came and went—­fat and thin, sharp-eyed and red-faced—­who were neither clients nor lawyers.  These were really secretive gentlemen, though most of them had a hail-fellow-well-met manner and a hearty greeting, but when they talked to the Honourable Hilary it was with doors shut, and even then they sat very close to his ear.  Many of them preferred now to wait in Austen’s office instead of the anteroom, and some of them were not so cautious with the son of Hilary Vane that they did not let drop certain observations to set him thinking.  He had a fanciful if somewhat facetious way of calling them by feudal titles which made them grin.

“How is the Duke of Putnam this morning?” he would ask of the gentleman of whom the Ripton Record would frequently make the following announcement:  “Among the prominent residents of Putnam County in town this week was the Honourable Brush Bascom.”

The Honourable Brush and many of his associates, barons and earls, albeit the shrewdest of men, did not know exactly how to take the son of Hilary Vane.  This was true also of the Honourable Hilary himself, who did not wholly appreciate the humour in Austen’s parallel of the feudal system.  Although Austen had set up for himself, there were many ways—­not legal —­in which the son might have been helpful to the father, but the Honourable Hilary hesitated, for some unformulated reason, to make use of him; and the consequence was that Mr. Hamilton Tooting and other young men of a hustling nature in the Honourable Hilary’s office found that Austen’s advent did not tend greatly to lighten a certain class of their labours.  In fact, father and son were not much nearer in spirit than when ode had been in Pepper County and the other in Ripton.  Caution and an instinct which senses obstacles are characteristics of gentlemen in Mr. Vane’s business.