“It’s all Horace Boyce now. You don’t hear anything else. Everybody is saying he will soon be our leading man. They tell me that he speaks beautifully—in public, I mean—and he is so good-looking and so bright; they all expect he’ll make quite a mark when court sits next month. I suppose hell throw his partner altogether into the shade; everybody at least seems to think so. And Reuben Tracy had such a chance—once.”
The tall, dark girl at the window still did not turn, but she took up the conversation with an accent of interest.
“Had a chance—what do you mean? I’ve never heard a word against him, except that idle story you told here once.”
“Idle or not, Kate, you can’t deny that the girl is here.”
Kate laughed, in scornful amusement. “No; and so winter is here, and you are here, and the snowbirds are here, and all the rest of it. But what does that go to show?”
“And that reminds me,” exclaimed Tabitha, leaning forward in her chair with added eagerness—“now, what do you think?”
“The processes by which you are reminded of things, Tabitha, are not fit subjects for light and frivolous brains like mine.”
“You laugh; but you really never could guess it in all your born days. That Lawton girl—she’s actually a tenant of mine; or, that is, she rented from another party, but she’s in my house! You can just fancy what a state I was in when I heard of it.”
“How do you mean? What house?”
“You know those places of mine on Bridge Street—rickety old houses they’re getting to be now, though I must say they’ve stood much better than some built years and years after my father put them up, for he was the most thorough man about such things you ever saw, and as old Major Schoonmaker once said of him, he—”