exceedingly long, and perhaps for propriety's sake--Hilary Vane lived at
one end of it and Euphrasia at the other. Hilary was sixty-five,
Euphrasia seventy, which is not old for frugal people, though it is just
as well to add that there had never been a breath of scandal about either
of them, in Ripton or elsewhere. For the Honourable Hilary's modest needs
one room sufficed, and the front parlour had not been used since poor
Sarah Austen's demise, thirty years before this story opens.

In those thirty years, by a sane and steady growth, Hilary Vane had
achieved his present eminent position in the State. He was trustee for I
know not how many people and institutions, a deacon in the first church,
a lawyer of such ability that he sometimes was accorded the
courtesy-title of "Judge." His only vice--if it could be called such--was
in occasionally placing a piece, the size of a pea, of a particular kind
of plug tobacco under his tongue,--and this was not known to many people.
Euphrasia could not be called a wasteful person, and Hilary had
accumulated no small portion of this world's goods, and placed them as
propriety demanded, where they were not visible to the naked eye: and be
it added in his favour that he gave as secretly, to institutions and
hospitals the finances and methods of which were known to him.

As concrete evidence of the Honourable Hilary Vane's importance, when he
travelled he had only to withdraw from his hip-pocket a book in which
many coloured cards were neatly inserted, an open-sesame which permitted
him to sit without payment even in those wheeled palaces of luxury known
as Pullman cars. Within the limits of the State he did not even have to
open the book, but merely say, with a twinkle of his eyes to the
conductor, "Good morning, John," and John would reply with a bow and a
genial and usually witty remark, and point him out to a nobody who sat in
the back of the car. So far had Mr. Hilary Vane's talents carried him.