Reuben TRacy.
Reuben locked up the keepsake note again, fondly entertaining the idea as he did so that soon there might be others to bear it company. Then he closed the offices, went down upon the street, and told the first idle boy he met that he could earn fifty cents by carrying a letter at once to the home of the Minsters. The money would be his when he returned to the Dearborn House.
“Will there be any answer?” asked the boy.
This opened up a new idea to the lawyer. “You might wait and see,” he said.
But the messenger came back in a depressingly short space of time, with the word that no answer was required.
He had hurried both ways with a stem concentration of purpose, and now he dashed off once more in an even more strenuous face against time with the half-dollar clutched securely inside his mitten. The Great Occidental Minstrel Combination was in town, and the boy leaped over snowbanks, and slid furiously across slippery places, in the earnestness of his intention not to miss one single joke.
The big man whom he left went wearily up the stairs to his room, and walked therein for aimless hours, and almost scowled as he shook his head at the waitress who came up to remind him that he had had no supper.
The two Minster sisters had read Reuben’s note together, in the seclusion of their own sitting-room. They had previously discussed the fact of his refusal to assist them—for so it translated itself in Kate’s account of the interview—and had viewed it with almost displeasure.
Ethel was, however, disposed to relent when the letter came.