It is rare, in this world of trouble, that such an apparently ideal and happy state of existence is without a canker.  And I have left the revelation of the canker to the last.  Ripton knew it was there, Camden Street knew it, and Mr. Vane’s acquaintances throughout the State; but nobody ever spoke of it.  Euphrasia shed over it the only tears she had known since Sarah Austen died, and some of these blotted the only letters she wrote.  Hilary Vane did not shed tears, but his friends suspected that his heart-strings were torn, and pitied him.  Hilary Vane fiercely resented pity, and that was why they did not speak of it.  This trouble of his was the common point on which he and Euphrasia touched, and they touched only to quarrel.  Let us out with it—­Hilary Vane had a wild son, whose name was Austen.

Euphrasia knew that in his secret soul Mr. Vane attributed this wildness, and what he was pleased to designate as profligacy, to the Austen blood.  And Euphrasia resented it bitterly.  Sarah Austen had been a young, elfish thing when he married her,—­a dryad, the elderly and learned Mrs. Tredway had called her.  Mr Vane had understood her about as well as he would have understood Mary, Queen of Scots, if he had been married to that lady.  Sarah Austen had a wild, shy beauty, startled, alert eyes like an animal, and rebellious black hair that curled about her ears and gave her a faun-like appearance.  With a pipe and the costume of Rosalind she would have been perfect.  She had had a habit of running off for the day into the hills with her son, and the conventions of Ripton had been to her as so many defunct blue laws.  During her brief married life there had been periods of defiance from her lasting a week, when she would not speak to Hilary or look at him, and these periods would be followed by violent spells of weeping in Euphrasia’s arms, when the house was no place for Hilary.  He possessed by matrimony and intricate mechanism of which his really admirable brain could not grasp the first principles; he felt for her a real if uncomfortable affection, but when she died he heaved a sigh of relief, at which he was immediately horrified.

Austen he understood little better, but his affection for the child may be likened to the force of a great river rushing through a narrow gorge, and he vied with Euphrasia in spoiling him.  Neither knew what they were doing, and the spoiling process was interspersed with occasional and (to Austen) unmeaning intervals of severe discipline.  The boy loved the streets and the woods and his fellow-beings; his punishments were a series of afternoons in the house, during one of which he wrecked the bedroom where he was confined, and was soundly whaled with an old slipper that broke under the process.  Euphrasia kept the slipper, and once showed it to Hilary during a quarrel they had when the boy was grown up and gone and the house was silent, and Hilary had turned away, choking, and left the room.  Such was his cross.