Hilary Vane groaned more than once in the train back to Ripton.  It meant nothing to him to be the father of the most popular man in college.

“The mad expedition” came at length in the shape of a fight with the townspeople, in which Austen, of course, was the ringleader.  If he had inherited his mother’s eccentricities, he had height and physique from the Vanes, and one result was a week in bed for the son of the local plumber and a damage suit against the Honourable Hilary.  Another result was that Austen and a Tom Gaylord came back to Ripton on a long suspension, which, rumour said, would have been expulsion if Hilary were not a trustee.  Tom Gaylord was proud of suspension in such company.  More of him later.  He was the son of old Tom Gaylord, who owned more lumber than any man in the State, and whom Hilary Vane believed to be the receptacle of all the vices.

Eventually Austen went back and graduated—­not summa cum laude, honesty compels me to add.  Then came the inevitable discussion, and to please his father he went to the Harvard Law School for two years.  At the end of that time, instead of returning to Ripton, a letter had come from him with the postmark of a Western State, where he had fled with a classmate who owned ranch.  Evidently the worldly consideration to be derived from conformity counted little with Austen Vane.  Money was a medium only—­not an end.  He was in the saddle all day, with nothing but the horizon to limit him; he loved his father, and did not doubt his father’s love for him, and he loved Euphrasia.  He could support himself, but he must see life.  The succeeding years brought letters and quaint, useless presents to both the occupants of the lonely house,—­Navajo blankets and Indian jeweler and basket-work,—­and Austen little knew how carefully these were packed away and surreptitiously gazed at from time to time.  But to Hilary the Western career was a disgrace, and such meagre reports of it as came from other sources than Austen tended only to confirm him in this opinion.

It was commonly said of Mr. Paul Pardriff that not a newspaper fell from the press that he did not have a knowledge of its contents.  Certain it was that Mr. Pardriff made a specialty of many kinds of knowledge, political and otherwise, and, the information he could give—­if he chose —­about State and national affairs was of a recondite and cynical nature that made one wish to forget about the American flag.  Mr. Pardriff was under forty, and with these gifts many innocent citizens of Ripton naturally wondered why the columns of his newspaper, the Ripton Record, did not more closely resemble the spiciness of his talk in the office of Gales’ Hotel.  The columns contained, instead, such efforts as essays on a national flower and the abnormal size of the hats of certain great men, notably Andrew Jackson; yes, and the gold standard; and in times of political stress they were devoted to a somewhat fulsome praise