THE LAWTON GIRL

Thessaly! Ten minutes for refreshments!” called out the brisk young colored porter, advancing up the aisle of the drawing-room car, whisk-broom in hand. “Change cahs foh Thanksgiving turkey and cranberry sauce,” he added, upon humorous after-thought, smiling broadly as he spoke, and chuckling to himself.

This friendly remark was addressed in confidence to a group of three persons at the forward end of the car, who began preparations for the halt as the clanking of the wheels beneath them grew more measured, and the carriage trembled and lurched under the pressure of the brakes. But the cheery grin which went with it was exclusively directed to the two ladies who rose now from their arm-chairs, and who gently relaxed their features in amused response.

Whether the porter was moved only by the comeliness of these faces and their gracious softening, or whether he was aware that they were patrician countenances, so to speak, and belonged to Mrs. and Miss Minster, persons of vast wealth and importance and considerable stockholders in this very railroad, is not clear. But he made a great bustle over getting their parcels down from the racks overhead, and helping them to don their outer garments. He smoothed the rich fur of their sealskin cloaks with almost affectionate strokes of his coffee-colored palms, and made a pile of their belongings on the next seat with an exaggerated show of dexterity and zeal. This done, he turned for a cursory moment to the young man who constituted the third member of the group, peremptorily pulled up the collar of his overcoat to the top of his ears, and was back again with his arms full of the ladies’ bundles as the train came to a stop.

“This way, ladies,” he said, marching jauntily under his burden toward the door.

“I will bid you good-day, Mr. Boyce,” said the elder of the women, speaking with somewhat formal politeness, but offering her hand.

“Good-day, sir,” the younger said simply, with a little inclination of the head, but with no “Mr. Boyce,” and no proffer of her gloved fingers.

The young man murmured “so delighted to have had the privilege” between low answering bows, and then stood watching the two fur-draped figures move to the door and disappear, with a certain blankness of expression on his face which seemed to say that he had hoped for a more cordial leave-taking. Then he smiled with reassurance, folded up and pocketed his thin car-cap, adjusted his glossy silk hat carefully, and proceeded to tug out his own valise. It was a matter of some difficulty to get the cumbrous bag down off the high icy steps to the ground. It was even more disagreeable to carry it along when he had got it down, and after a few paces he let it fall with a grunt of vexation, and looked about him for assistance. “How much better they do these things in Europe!” was what he thought as he looked.

All day long he had been journeying over a snowbound country—with white-capped houses, white-frozen streams, white-tufted firs, white-mantled fields and roads and hillsides, forever dodging one another in the dissolving panorama before his window. The train drawn up for the moment behind him might have come in from the North Pole, so completely laden with snow was every flat surface—of roof and beam, of platform and window-frame—presented by the dark line of massive coaches. Yet it seemed to him that there was more snow, more bleak and cheerless evidence of winter, here in his native Thessaly, than he had seen anywhere else. It was characteristic, too, he felt, that nobody should appear to care how much inconvenience this snow caused. There was but an indifferently shovelled path leading from where he stood, across the open expanse of side-tracks to the old and dingy dépôt beyond—cleared for the use of such favored passengers as might alight from the drawing-room section of the train. Those who had arrived in the ordinary cars at the rear were left to flounder through the smoke-begrimed drifts as best they could.

The foremost of these unconsidered travellers were coming up, red and angry with the exertion of carrying their own luggage, and plunging miserably along through the great ridges of discolored snow heaped between the tracks, when Mr. Boyce’s impatient eye fell upon somebody he knew.

“Hello there, Lawton!” he shouted. “Come here and help me with this infernal bag, won’t you!”

The man to whom he called had been gazing down the yard at the advancing wayfarers. He looked up now, hesitated for a moment, then came forward slowly, shuffling through the snow to the path. He was a middle-aged, thin, and round-shouldered man, weak and unkempt as to face and hair and beard, with shabby clothes and no overcoat. Although he wore mittens, he still from force of habit had his hands plunged half-way into his trousers pockets. Even where it would have been easy to step over the intermittent drifts and mounds at the sides of the tracks, he shiftlessly pushed his feet through them instead.

“Hello, Hod!” he said slowly, with a kind of melancholy hesitation, “is that you?”

Young Mr. Boyce ignored the foolish question, and indicated the valise with a nod of his head.

“I wish you’d get that thing down to the house, Ben. And take these checks for my trunks, too, will you, and see that they’re brought down. Where is that expressman, anyway? Why isn’t he here, on hand, attending to his business?”

“I don’t know as I can, Hod,” said the man without an overcoat, idly kicking into a heap of mingled cinders and snow with his wet, patched boots, and glancing uneasily down the yard. “I’m down here a-waitin’—for—that is to say, I’ve got somethin’ else to do. Prob’ly you can get some other fellow outside the deepo.”

Mr. Boyce’s answer to this was to add a bright half-dollar to the brass baggage-checks he already held in his hand. The coin was on the top, and Ben Lawton could not help looking at it. The temptation was very great.

“I ought to stay here, you know,” he faltered. “Fact is, honest Injun! I got to stay here! I’m lookin’ for—somebody a-comin’ in on this train.”

“Well, you can look, can’t you, and do this too? There’s no hurry about the things. If they’re home two hours hence it will be time enough.”

“Yes, I know, it might be so as I could do it, later on,” said Lawton, taking one of his hands from his pocket and stretching it tentatively toward the money. Then a second thought prompted him to waver, and he drew back the hand, muttering feebly: “Then, again, it might be so as I couldn’t do it. You better get somebody else. And yet—I don’t know—p’raps—”

Mr. Boyce settled the question by briskly reaching down for his bag. “All right! Please yourself,” he said. “I’ve got no more time to waste with you. I’ll do it myself.”

Before he had fairly lifted the valise from the ground, the irresolute Lawton made up his mind. “Put her down again, Hod,” he said. “I’ll manage it somehow.”

He took the half-dollar in his mittened hand, and tossed it gently up and down on the striped blue and white surface of yarn. “It’s the first money I’ve earned for over a week,” he remarked, as if in self-defence.

Even as he spoke, a young woman in black who had been wandering about in the dépôt yard came running excitedly up to him. She gave a little inarticulate cry of recognition as she drew near. He turned, saw her, and in a bewildered way opened his arms. She dropped her bundles and bandbox heedlessly into the snow, and threw herself upon his breast, hiding her face on his threadbare coat, and sobbing audibly.

Mr. Boyce had been entirely unprepared for this demonstration, and looked wonderingly upon the couple who stood in the path before him. After a moment or two of silent inspection he made as if to pass them, but they did not move. The girl still hid her face, although she had ceased to weep, and Lawton bent his head down over hers, with tears in his eyes and his gaze fixed vaguely on the snow beyond her, while he tenderly patted her shoulder with the hand that did not hold the half-dollar.

“All right, then, Ben,” Mr. Boyce called out. “If you’ll just let me pass, I’ll walk on. Have the things there by five.”

At the first sound of this voice, the girl raised her head. She turned now, her tear-stained face luminous with a deep, wrathful emotion, and looked at the speaker.

The young man did not for more than an instant try to meet this glance. His cheek flushed and his eyes sought the ground. He lifted his hand with a hurried, awkward gesture toward his hat, made a hasty plunge around them through the snow, and walked swiftly away past the gate into the dépôt.

The girl’s intent gaze followed the retiring Mr. Boyce until he disappeared. Then it shifted suddenly and fell upon the face of Ben Lawton, from whose embrace she had now withdrawn.

The poor man made no effort whatsoever to brave its searching and reproachful inquiry. He balanced the half-dollar on his mitten’s edge, watched the exercise with a piteously futile pretence of interest, and looked as if he was about to cry.

“What ‘things’ were those he spoke of, father?” she asked, after a long pause.

The passengers who had temporarily left the train for the doubtful solace of the refreshment counter were beginning now to return. Some of them jostled past the couple who stood blocking the narrow path; and one of these, a stout and choleric man in a silk skull-cap and a fur-lined overcoat, brusquely kicked the big valise out of the way, overturning it in the snow. Lawton had not found the courage necessary for a complete explanation. He bent over now, set the bag on its bottom again, and made partial answer:

“This is one of ’em.”

The heavy train, snow-capped and sombre, began to draw out of the yard. The two Lawtons stood and silently watched it unfold its length—saw first the broad, plate-glass panes of the drawing-room and sleeping cars, with their luxurious shadows and glimpses of well-groomed heads and costly stuffs behind, glide slowly, sedately by; then, more rapidly, the closer-set windows of the yellow, common cars, through the steam on which visions of hats and faces dimly crowded; and last, the diminishing rear platform, with its solitary brakeman vehemently whirling the horizontal wheel of the brake—grow small, then indistinct, then vanish altogether. A sense of desertion, of having been left behind, seemed to brood over the old clapboarded dépôt like a cloud, darkening the ashen masses of snow round about and chilling the very air.

The daughter looked once more at her father.

“You are going to carry his things!” she said, with a stern, masterful inflection in her voice, and with flashing eyes.

“Hope-to-die, Jess, I tried as hard as I could to get out of it—made all sorts of excuses,” Lawton pleaded, shrinking meantime from her gaze, and furtively but clumsily slipping the coin into his pocket. “But you know the kind of fellow Hod is—” he stammered here with confusion, and made haste to add—“what I mean is—he—well, he just wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

She went, on coldly, as if she had not heard: “You have got his money—I saw it—there in your hand.”

“Well, I tell you what, Jess,” the father answered, with an accession of boldness, “half-dollars don’t grow on every bush up this way. I ain’t seen one afore in a fortnight. And to-morrow’s Thanksgiving, you know—and then you’ve come home—and what was a fellow to do?”

The girl turned, as if it were fruitless to say more. Then the necessity for relief mastered her: she faced him again, and ground the words from between her set teeth with scornful sadness:

“You take his money—and yet you knew!”

CHAPTER II.—CONFRONTING THE ORDEAL.

JESSICA Lawton stood on the sidewalk outside the dépôt, and waited for the return of her father, who had gone in search of the expressman.

The street up and down which she glanced was in a sense familiar to her, for she had been born and reared on a hillside road not far away, and until her eighteenth year had beheld no finer or more important place than this Thessaly—which once had seemed so big and grand, and now, despite the obvious march of “improvement,” looked so dwarfed and countrified in its overlarge, misfitting coat of snow.

She found herself puzzled vaguely by the confusion of objects she remembered with things which appeared not at all to belong to the scene. There was the old Dearborn House, for example, on the same old corner, with its high piazza overhanging both streets, and its seedy brown clapboard sides that had needed a fresh painting as long as she could recollect—and had not got it yet. But beside it, where formerly had been a long, straggling line of decrepit sheds, was reared now a tall, narrow, flat-roofed brick building—the village fire-engine house; and through the half-open door, in which a man and a bull-dog stood surveying her, she could see the brassy brightness of a huge modern machine within. It seemed only yesterday that the manhood of Thessaly had rejoiced and perspired over the heavy, unwieldy wheeled pump which was dragged about with ropes and worked by means of long hand-brakes, with twelve men on a side, and a ducking from the hose for all shirkers. And here was a citified brick engine-house, and a “steamer” drawn by horses!

Everywhere, as she looked, this incongruous jumbling of the familiar and the novel forced itself upon the girl’s attention. And neither the old nor the new bore on its face any welcome for her.

In a narrower and more compact street than this main thoroughfare of Thessaly, the people in view would have constituted almost a crowd. The stores all seemed to be doing a thriving business, particularly if those who lounged about looking in the windows might be counted upon presently to buy something. Both sides of the road were lined with rustic sleighs, drawn up wherever paths had been cut through the deep snow to the sidewalks; and farmers in big overcoats, comforters, and mittens were visible by scores, spreading buffalo-robes over their horses, or getting out armfuls of turkeys and tubs of butter from the straw in the bottoms of their sleds, or stamping with their heavy boots on the walks for warmth, as they discussed prices and the relative badness of the various snow-blocked roads in the vicinity. Farther down the street a load of hay had tipped over in the middle of the road, and the driver, an old man with a faded army-overcoat and long hair, was hurling loud imprecations at some boys who had snowballed him, and who now, from a safe distance, yelled back impolite rejoinders.

Among all who passed, Jessica caught sight of no accustomed face. In a way, indeed, they were all familiar enough: they were types in feature and voice and dress and manner of the people among whom her whole earlier life had been spent. But she knew none of them—and was at once glad of this, and very melancholy.

She had done a rash and daring thing in coming back to Dearborn County. It had seemed the right thing to do, and she had found the strength and resolution to do it. But there had been many moments of quaking trepidation during the long railroad journey from Tecumseh that day, and she was conscious now, as she looked about her, of a well-nigh complete collapse of courage. The tears would come, and she had more than once furtively to lift her handkerchief to her face.

It was not a face with which one, at first glance, would readily associate tears. The features were regularly, almost firmly cut; and the eyes—large, fine eyes though they were—had commonly a wide awake, steady, practical look, which expressed anything rather than weakness. The effect of the countenance, as a whole, suggested an energetic, self-contained young woman, who knew her way about, who was likely to be neither cheated nor flattered out of her rights, and who distinctly belonged to the managing division of the human race. This conception of her was aided by the erect, independent carriage of her shoulders, which made her seem taller than she really was, and by the clever simplicity of her black tailor-made jacket and dress, and her round, shapely, turban-like hat.

But if one looked closely into this face, here in the snowlight of the November afternoon, there would be found sundry lines and shadows of sensibility and of suffering which were at war with its general expression. And these, when one caught them, had an air of being new, and of not yet having had time to lay definite hold upon the face itself. They were nearer it now, perhaps, as the tears came, than they had often been before, yet even now both they and the moisture glistening on the long lashes, appeared foreign to the calm immobility of the countenance. Tears did not seem to belong there, nor smiles.

Yet a real smile did all at once move to softness the compressed lines of her lips, and bring color to her cheeks and a pleasant mellowing of glance into her eyes. She had been striving to occupy her all-too-introspective mind by reading the signs with which the house-fronts were thickly covered; and here, on a doorway close beside her, was one at sight of which her whole face brightened. And it was a charming face now—a face to remember—with intelligence and fine feeling and frank happiness in every lineament, yet with the same curious suggestion, too, of the smile, like the tears, being rare and unfamiliar.

The sign was a small sheet of tin, painted in yellow letters on a black ground:=

`````REUBEN TRACY,

````Attorney and Counsellor at Law,

`````Second Floor.=

“Oh, he is here, then; he has come back!” she said aloud. She repeated, with an air of enjoying the sound of the words: “He has come back.”

She walked up to the sign, read it over and over again, and even touched it, in a meditative way, with the tip of her gloved finger. The smile came to her face once more as she murmured: “He will know—he will make it easier for me.”

But even as she spoke the sad look spread over her face again. She walked back to the place where she had been standing, and looked resolutely away from the sign—at the tipped-over load of hay, at the engine-house, at the sleighs passing to and fro—through eyes dimmed afresh with tears.

Thus she still stood when her father returned. The expressman who halted his bob-sleigh at the cutting in front of her, and who sat holding the reins while her father piled her valise and parcels on behind, looked her over with a half-awed, half-quizzical glance, and seemed a long time making up his mind to speak. Finally he said:

“How d’do? Want to ride here, on the seat, longside of me?”

There was an indefinable something in his tone, and in the grin that went with it, which she resented quickly.

“I had no idea of riding at all,” she made answer.

Her father, who had seated himself on a trunk in the centre of the sleigh, interposed. “Why, Jess, you remember Steve, don’t you?” he asked, apologetically.

The expressman and the girl looked briefly at one another, and nodded in a perfunctory manner.

Lawton went on: “He offered himself to give us a lift as far as the house. He’s goin’ that way—ain’t you, Steve?”

The impulse was strong in Jessica to resist—precisely why she might have found it difficult to explain—but apparently there was no choice remaining to her. “Very well, then,” she said, “I will sit beside you, father.”

She stepped into the sleigh at this, and took her seat on the other end of the big trunk. The express-man gave a slap of the lines and a cluck to the horse, which started briskly down the wide street, the bell at its collar giving forth a sustained, cheery tinkle as they sped through the snow.

“Well, what do you think—ain’t this better’n walkin’?” remarked Lawton, after a time, knocking his heels in a satisfied way against the side of the trunk.

“I felt as if the walk would do me good,” she answered, simply. Her face was impassivity itself, as she looked straight before her, over the express-man’s shoulder.

Ben Lawton felt oppressed by the conviction that his daughter was annoyed. Perhaps it was because he had insisted on riding—instead of saying that he would walk too, when she had disclosed her preference. He ventured upon an explanation, stealing wistful glances at her meantime:

“You see, Jess, Dave Rantell’s got a turkey-shoot on to-day, down at his place, and I kind o’ thought I’d try my luck with this here half-dollar, ’fore it gets dark. The days are shortenin’ so, this season o’ year, that I couldn’t get there without Steve give me a lift. And if I should get a turkey—why, we’ll have a regular Thanksgiving dinner; and with you come home, too!”

To this she did not trust herself to make answer, but kept her face rigidly set, and her eyes fixed as if engrossed in meditation. They had passed the great iron-works on the western outskirts of the village now, and the road leading to the suburb of Burfield ran for a little through almost open country. The keener wind raised here in resistance to the rapid transit of the sleigh—no doubt it was this which brought the deep flush to her cheeks and the glistening moisture to her eyes.

They presently overtook two young men who were trudging along abreast, each in one of the tracks made by traffic, and who stepped aside to let the sleigh go by.

“Hello, Hod!” called out the expressman as he passed. “I’ve got your trunks. Come back for good?”

“Hello, Steve!... I don’t quite know yet,” was the reply which came back—the latter half of it too late for the expressman’s ears.

Jessica had not seen the pedestrians until the sleigh was close upon them; then, in the moment’s glimpse of them vouchsafed her, she had recognized young Mr. Boyce, and, in looking away from him with swift decision, had gazed full into the eyes of his companion. This other remembered her too, it was evident, even in that brief instant of passing, for a smile of greeting was in the glance he returned, and he lifted his hat as she swept by.

This was Reuben Tracy, then! Despite his beard, he seemed scarcely to have aged in face during these last five years; but he looked straighter and stronger, and his bearing had more vigor and firmness than she remembered of him in the days when she was an irregular pupil at the little old Burfield-road school-house, and he was the teacher. She was glad that he looked so hale and healthful. And had her tell-tale face, she wondered, revealed as she passed him all the deep pleasure she felt at seeing him again—at knowing he was near? She tried to recall whether she had smiled, and could not make sure. But he had smiled—of that there was not a doubt; and he had known her on the instant, and had taken off his hat, not merely jerked his finger toward it. Ah, what delight there was in these thoughts!

She turned to her father, and lifting her voice above the jingle of the bell, spoke with animation:

“Tell me about the second man we just, passed—Mr. Tracy. Has he been in Thessaly long, and is he doing a good business?” She added hastily, as if to forestall some possible misconception: “He used to be my school-teacher, you know.”

“Guess he’s gettin’ on all right,” replied Lawton: “I hain’t heard nothin’ to the contrary. He must a’ been back from New York along about a year—maybe two.” To her great annoyance he shouted out to the driver: “Steve, how long’s Rube Tracy been back in Thessaly? You keep track o’ things better’n I do.”

The expressman replied over his shoulder: “Should say about a year come Christmas.” Then, after a moment’s pause, he transferred the reins to his other hand, twisted himself half around on his seat, and looked into Jessica’s face with his earlier and offensive expression of mingled familiarity and diffidence. “He appeared to remember you: took off his hat,” he said. There was an unmistakable leer on his lank countenance as he added:

“That other fellow was Hod Boyce, the General’s son, you know—just come back from the old country.”

“Yes, I know!” she made answer curtly, and turned away from him.

During what remained of the journey she preserved silence, keeping her gaze steadily fixed on the drifted fields beyond the fence in front of her and thinking about these two young men—at first with infinite bitterness and loathing of the one, and then, for a longer time, and with a soft, half-saddened pleasure, of the other.

It was passing strange that she should find herself here at all—here in this village which for years at a time she had sworn never to see again. But, when she thought of it, it seemed still more remarkable that at the very outset she should see, walking together, the two men whom memory most distinctly associated with her old life here as a girl. She had supposed them both—her good and her evil genius—to be far away; in all her inchoate specula-tions about how she should meet various people, no idea of encountering either of these had risen in her mind. Yet here they were—and walking together!

Their conjunction disturbed and vaguely troubled her. She tried over and over again to reassure herself by saying that it was a mere accident; of course they had been acquainted with each other for years, and they had happened to meet, and what more natural than that they should walk on side by side? And yet it somehow seemed wrong.

Reuben Tracy was the best man she had ever known. Poor girl—so grievous had been her share of life’s lessons that she really thought of him as the only good man she had ever known. In all the years of her girlhood—unhappy, wearied, and mutinous, with squalid misery at home, and no respite from it possible outside which, looked back upon at this distance, did not seem equally coarse and repellent—there had been but this solitary gleam of light, the friendship of Reuben Tracy. Striving now to recall the forms in which this friendship had been manifested, she was conscious that there was not much to remember. He had simply impressed her as a wise and unselfish friend—that was all. The example of kindness, gentleness, of patient industry which he had set before her in the rude, bare-walled little school-room, and which she felt now had made a deep and lasting impression on her, had been set for all the rest as well. If sometimes he had seemed to like her better than the other girls, his preference was of a silent, delicate, unexpressed sort—as if prompted solely by acquaintance with her greater need for sympathy. Without proffers of aid, almost without words, he had made her comprehend that, if evil fell upon her, the truest and most loyal help and counsel in all the world could be had from him for the asking.

The evil had fallen, in one massed, cruel, stunning stroke, and she had staggered blindly away—away anywhere, anyhow, to any fate. Almost her instincts had persuaded her to go to him; but he was a young man, only a few years her senior—and she had gone away without seeing him. But she had carried into the melancholy, bitter exile a strange sense of gratitude, if so it may be called, to Reuben Tracy for the compassionate aid he would have extended, had he known; and she said to herself now, in her heart of hearts, that it was this good feeling which had remained like a leaven of hope in her nature, and had made it possible for her at last, by its mysterious and beneficent workings, to come out into the open air again and turn her face toward the sunlight.

And he had taken off his hat to her!

The very thought newly nerved her for the ordeal which she had proposed to herself—the task of bearing, here in the daily presence of those among whom she had been reared, the burden of a hopelessly discredited life.

CHAPTER III.—YOUNG MR. BOYCE’S MEDITATIONS.

The changes in Thessaly’s external appearance did not particularly impress young Mr. Horace Boyce as he walked down the main street in the direction of his father’s house. For one thing, he had been here for a fortnight only a few months before, upon his return from Europe, and had had pointed out to him all of novelty that his native village offered. And again, nearly four years of acquaintance with the chief capitals of the Old World had so dulled his vision, so to speak, that it was no longer alert to detect the presence of new engine-houses and brick stores in the place of earlier and less imposing structures. To be accurate, he did not think much about Thessaly, one way or the other. So long as his walk led him along the busier part of the thoroughfare, his attention was fully occupied by encounters and the exchange of greetings with old school-fellows and neighbors, who all seemed glad to see him home again; and when he had passed the last store on the street, and had of necessity exchanged the sidewalk for one of the two deep-beaten tracks in the centre of the drifted road, his thoughts were still upon a more engrossing subject than the growth and prosperity of any North American town.

They were pleasant thoughts, though, as any one might read in a glance at his smooth-shaven, handsome face, with its satisfied half smile and its bold, confident expression of eyes. He stopped once in his rapid walk and stood for a minute or two in silent contemplation, just before he reached the open stretch of country which lay like a wedge between the two halves of the village. The white surface in front of him was strewn here with dry boughs and twigs, broken from the elms above by the weight of the recent snowfall. Beyond the fence some boys with comforters tied about their ears were skating on a pond in the fields. Mr. Boyce looked over these to the darkened middle-distance of the wintry picture, where rose the grimy bulk and tall smoke-belching chimneys of the Minster iron-works. He seemed to find exhilaration in his long, intent gaze at these solid evidences of activity and wealth, for he filled his lungs with a deep, contented draught of the nipping air when he finally turned and resumed his walk, swinging his shoulders and lightly tapping the crusted snowbanks at his side with his stick as he stepped briskly forward.

The Minster iron-works were undoubtedly worth thinking about, and all the more so because they were not new. During all the dozen or more years of their existence they had never once been out of blast. At seasons of extreme depression in the market, when even Pennsylvania was idle and the poor smelters of St. Louis and Chicago could scarcely remember when they had been last employed, these chimneys upon which he had just looked had never ceased for a day to hurl their black clouds into the face of the sky. They had been built by one of the cleverest and most daring of all the strong men whom that section had produced—the late Stephen Minster. It was he who had seen in the hills close about the choicest combination of ores to be found in the whole North; it was he who had brought in the capital to erect and operate the works, who had organized and controlled the enterprise by which a direct road to the coal-fields was opened, and who, in affording employment to thousands and good investments to scores, had not failed to himself amass a colossal fortune. He had been dead now nearly three years, but the amount of his wealth, left in its entirety to his family, was still a matter of conjecture. Popular speculation upon this point had but a solitary clew with which to work. In a contest which arose a year before his death, over the control of the Northern Union Telegraph Company, he had sent down proxies representing a clear six hundred thousand dollars’ worth of shares. With this as a basis for calculation, curious people had arrived at a shrewd estimate of his total fortune as ranging somewhere between two and three millions of dollars.

Stephen Minster had died very suddenly, and had been sincerely mourned by a community which owed him nothing but good-will, and could remember no single lapse from honesty or kindliness in his whole unostentatious, useful career. It was true that the absence of public-spirited bequests in his will created for the moment a sense of disappointment; but the explanation quickly set afoot—that he had not foreseen an early death, and had postponed to declining years, which, alas! never came, the task of apportioning a moiety of his millions among deserving charities—was plausible enough to be received everywhere. By virtue of a testament executed two years before—immediately after the not altogether edifying death of his only son—all his vast property devolved upon Mrs. Minster, and her two daughters, Kate and Ethel. Every unmarried man in Thessaly—and perhaps, with a certain vague repining, here and there one of the married men too—remembered all these facts each time he passed the home of the Minsters on the Seminary road, and looked over the low wall of masonry at the close-trimmed lawn, the costly fountain, the gravelled carriage-drive, and the great house standing back and aloof in stately seclusion among the trees and the rose-bushes.

Most of these facts were familiar as well to Mr. Horace Boyce. As he strode along, filliping the snow with his cane and humming to himself, he mentally embellished them with certain deductions drawn from information gathered during the journey by rail from New York. The Miss Kate Minster whom he had met was the central figure in his meditations, as indeed she was the important personage in her family. The mother had impressed him as an amiable and somewhat limited woman, without much force of character; the younger daughter, Ethel, he remembered dimly, as a delicate and under-sized girl who was generally kept home from school by reason of ill-health, and it was evident from such remarks as the two ladies dropped that she was still something of an invalid. But it was clear that Miss Kate lacked neither moral nor bodily strength.

He was quite frank with himself in thinking that, apart from all questions of money, she was one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen. It was an added charm that her beauty fitted so perfectly the idea of great wealth. She might have been the daughter of the millions themselves, so tall and self-contained and regal a creature was she, with the firm, dark face of her father reproduced in feminine grace and delicacy of outline; with a skin as of an Oriental queen, softly luxuriant in texture and in its melting of creamy and damask and deepening olive hues; and with large, richly brown, deep-fringed eyes which looked proudly and steadily on all the world, young men included. These fine orbs were her most obvious physical inheritance from her father. The expression “the Minster eyes,” would convey as distinct an impression to the brain of the average Thessalian as if one had said “the Minster iron-works.” The great founder of the millions, Stephen Minster, had had them, and they were the notable feature of even his impressive face. The son who was dead, Stephen junior, had also had them, as Horace now recalled to mind; but set in his weak head they had seemed to lose significance, and had been, in truth, very generally in his latter years dimmed and opacated by the effects of dissipation. The pale, sweet-faced little Ethel Minster, as he remembered her, had them as well, although with her they were almost hazel in color, and produced a timid, mournful effect. But to no other face in the entire family gallery did they seem to so wholly belong of right as to the countenance of Miss Kate.

Young Mr. Boyce’s thoughts wandered easily from the image of the heiress to the less tangible question of her disposition, and, more particularly, of her attitude toward him. There were obscurities here over which a less sanguine young man might have bitten his lips. He had ventured upon recalling himself to mother and daughter very soon after the train left New York, and they had not shown any shadow of annoyance when he took a vacant chair opposite them and began a conversation which lasted, such as it was, through all the long journey. But now that he came to think of it, his share in that conversation had been not only the proverbial lion’s, but more nearly that of a whole zoological garden. Mrs. Minster had not affected any especial reserve; it was probable that she was by nature a listener rather than a talker, for she had asked him numerous questions about himself and about Europe. As for Miss Minster, he could scarcely recall anything she had said, what time she was looking at him instead of at her book. And he had not always been strictly comfortable under this look. There had been nothing unfriendly in it, it was true, nor could it occur to anybody to suspect in it a lack of comprehension or of interest. In fact, he said to himself, it was eloquent with both. The trouble was, as he uneasily attempted to define it, that she seemed to comprehend too much. Still, after all, he had said nothing to which she could take the faintest exception, and, if she was the intelligent woman he took her to be, there must have been a good deal in his talk to entertain her.

Even a less felicitous phrase-maker than Horace Boyce could have manufactured pleasant small-talk out of such experiences as his had been. The only son of a well-to-do and important man in Thessaly, he had had the further advantage of inheriting some twenty thousand dollars upon attaining his majority, and after finishing his course at college had betaken himself to Europe to pursue more recondite studies there, both in and out of his chosen profession of the law. The fact that he had devoted most of his attention to the gleaning of knowledge lying beyond the technical pale of the law did not detract from the interesting quality of his observations. Besides listening to lectures at Heidelberg, he had listened to the orchestra swaying in unison under the baton of Strauss at Vienna, and to a good many other things in Pesth and Paris and Brussels and London, a large number of which could with propriety be described in polite conversation. And he flattered himself that he had discoursed upon these things rather cleverly, skirting delicate points with neatness, and bringing in effective little descriptions and humorous characterizations in quite a natural way.

Moreover, he said to himself, it had been his privilege to see America in perspective—to stand upon a distant eminence, as it were, and look the whole country over, by and large, at a glance. This had enabled him on his return to discover the whimsical aspect of a good many things which the stay-at-home natives took with all seriousness. He had indicated some of these to the two ladies with a light and amiably bantering touch, and with a consciousness that he was opening up novel ground to both his hearers.

Still—he wondered if Miss Minster had really liked it. Could it be possible that she belonged to that thin-skinned class of Americans who cannot brook any comment upon anything in or of their country that is not wholly eulogistic—who resent even the most harmless and obvious pleasantry pointed at a cis-Atlantic institution? He decided this promptly in the negative. He had met such people, but he could not associate them in his mind with the idea of great wealth. And Miss Minster was rich—incredibly rich. No doubt she was thinking, even while she listened to him, of the time when she too should go to Europe, and dazzle its golden youth with her beauty and her millions. Now that he thought of it, he had seen much that same look before on the face of an American heiress, on her return from a London “five-o’clock tea,” at which she had met an eligible marquis.

Could it be that her thoughts ran, instead, upon an eligible somebody nearer home? He devoted himself at this to canvassing the chances of her fancy being already fixed. It was of little importance that nothing in their conversation suggested this, because it was a subject to which they naturally would not have alluded. Yet he recalled that Mrs. Minster had spoken of their great seclusion more than once. He had gathered, moreover, that they knew very few people in New York City, and that they had little acquaintance with the section of its population which is colloquially known as “society.” This looked mightily like a clear field.

Young Mr. Boyce stopped to thrust his cane under a twisted branch which lay on the snow, and toss it high over the fence, when he reached this stage of his meditations. His squared, erect shoulders took on a more buoyant swing than ever as he resumed his walk. A clear field, indeed!

And now as to the problem of proceeding to occupy that field. Where was there a gap in the wall? Millions were not to be approached and gained by simple and primitive methods, as one knocks apples off an overhanging bough with a fence-rail. Strategy and finesse of the first order were required. Without doubt there was an elaborate system of defences reared around this girl of girls. Mrs. Minster’s reference to seclusion might have itself been a warning that they lived inside a fort, and were as ready to train a gun on him as on anybody else. Battlements of this sort had been stormed time and time again, no doubt; human history was full of such instances. But Mr. Boyce’s tastes were not for violent or desperate adventures. To go over a parapet with one’s sword in one’s teeth, in deadly peril and tempestuous triumph, might suit his father the General: for his own part, it seemed more sagacious and indubitably safer to tunnel under the works, and emerge on the inside at the proper psychological moment to be welcomed as a friend and adviser.

Adviser! Who was their lawyer? The young man cast up in his mind the list of Thessaly’s legal practitioners, as far as he could remember them. It seemed most probable that Benoni Clarke, the ex-district-attorney, would have the Minster business, if for no other reason than that he needed it less than the rest did. But Mr. Clarke was getting old, and was in feeble health as well. Perhaps he would be glad to have a young, active, and able partner, who had had the advantage of European study. Or it might be—who could tell?—that the young man with the European education could go in on his own account, and by sheer weight of cleverness, energy, and superior social address win over the Minster business. What unlimited opportunities such a post would afford him! Not only would he be the only young man in Thessaly who had been outside of his own country, the best talker, the best-informed man, the best-mannered man of the place—but he would be able to exhibit all these excellences from the favored vantage-ground of an intimate, confidential relation. The very thought was intoxicating.

Mr. Horace Boyce was so pre-occupied with these pleasing meditations that he overtook a man walking in the other track, and had nearly passed him, before something familiar in the figure arrested his attention. He turned, and recognized an old schoolmate whom he had not seen for years, and had not expected to find in Thessaly.

“Why—Reuben Tracy, as I live!” he exclaimed, cordially. “So you’re back again, eh? On a visit to your folks?”

The other shook hands with him. “No,” he made answer. “I’ve had an office here for nearly a year. You are looking well. I’m glad to see you again. Have you come back for good?”

“Yes. That’s all settled,” replied Mr. Horace, without a moment’s hesitation.

CHAPTER IV.—REUBEN TRACY.

The two young men walked along together, separated by the ridge of snow between the tracks. They had never been more than friendly acquaintances, and they talked now of indifferent topics—of the grim climatic freak which had turned late November into mid-winter, of the results of the recent elections, and then of English weather and politics as contrasted with ours. It was a desultory enough conversation, for each had been absorbed in his own mind by thoughts a thousand leagues away from snowfalls and partisan strife, and the transition back to amiable commonplaces was not easy.

The music of a sleigh-bell, which for some time had been increasing in volume behind them, swelled suddenly into a shrill-voiced warning close at their backs, and they stepped aside into the snow to let the conveyance pass. It was then that the express-man called out his cheery greeting, and that Reuben lifted his hat.

As the sleigh grew small in the near distance, Reuben turned to his companion. “I notice that you told him you weren’t quite sure about staying here for good,” he remarked. “Perhaps I was mistaken—I understood you to say a few minutes ago that it was all settled.”

Horace was not to be embarrassed by so slight a discrepancy as this—although for the instant the reappearance of Jessica had sent his wits tripping—and he was ready with a glib explanation.

“What I meant was that I am quite settled in my desire to stay here. But of course there is just a chance that there may be no opening, and I don’t want to prematurely advertise what may turn out a failure. By the way, wasn’t that that Lawton girl?”

“Yes—Ben Lawton’s oldest daughter.”

Reuben’s tone had a slow preciseness in it which caused Horace to glance closely at him, and wonder if it were possible that it masked some ulterior meaning. Then he reflected that Reuben had always taken serious views of things, and talked in that grave, measured way, and that this was probably a mere mannerism. So he continued, with a careless voice:

“I haven’t seen her in years—should scarcely have known her. Isn’t it a little queer, her coming back?”

Reuben Tracy was a big man, with heavy shoulders, a large, impassive countenance, and an air which to the stranger suggested lethargy. It was his turn to look at Horace now, and he did so with a deliberate, steady gaze, to which the wide space between his eyes and the total absence of lines at the meeting of his brows lent almost the effect of a stare. When he had finished this inspection of his companion’s face, he asked simply:

“Why?”

“Well, of course, I have only heard it from others—but there seems to be no question about it—that she—”

“That she has been a sadly unfortunate and wretched girl,” interposed Reuben, finishing the sentence over which the other hesitated. “No, you are right. There is no question about that—no question whatever.”

“Well, that is why I spoke as I did—why I am surprised at seeing her here again. Weren’t you yourself surprised?”

“No, I knew that she was coming. I have a letter telling me the train she would arrive by.”

“Oh!”

The two walked on in silence for a minute or two. Then Horace said, with a fine assumption of good feeling and honest regret:

“I spoke thoughtlessly, old fellow; of course I couldn’t know that you were interested in—in the matter. I truly hope I didn’t say anything to wound your feelings.”

“Not at all,” replied Reuben. “How should you? What you said is what everybody will say—must say. Besides, my feelings are of no interest whatever, so far as this affair is concerned. It is her feelings that I am thinking of; and the more I think—well, the truth is, I am completely puzzled. I have never in all my experience been so wholly at sea.”

Manifestly Horace could do nothing at this juncture but look his sympathy. To ask any question might have been to learn nothing. But his curiosity was so great that he almost breathed a sigh of relief when Reuben spoke again, even though the query he put had its disconcerting side:

“I daresay you never knew much about her before she left Thessaly?”

“I knew her by sight, of course, just as a village boy knows everybody. I take it you did know her. I can remember that she was a pretty girl.”

If there was an underlying hint in this conjunction of sentences, it missed Reuben’s perception utterly. He replied in a grave tone:

“She was in my school, up at the Burfield. And if you had asked me in those days to name the best-hearted girl, the brightest girl, the one who in all the classes had the making of the best woman in her, I don’t doubt that I should have pointed to her. That is what makes the thing so inexpressibly sad to me now; and, what is more, I can’t in the least see my way.”

“Your way to what?”

“Why, to helping her, of course. She has undertaken something that frightens me when I think of it. This is the point: She has made up her mind to come back here, earn her own living decently, face the past out and live it down here among those who know that past best.”

“That’s a resolution that will last about three weeks.”

“No, I think she is determined enough. But I fear that she cruelly underestimates the difficulties of her task. To me it looks hopeless, and I’ve thought it over pretty steadily the last few days.”

“Pardon my asking you,” said Horace, “but you have confided thus far in me—what the deuce have you got to do with either her success or her failure?”

“I’ve told you that I was her teacher,” answered Reuben, still with the slow, grave voice. “That in itself would give me an interest in her. But there has been a definite claim made on me in her behalf. You remember Seth Fairchild, don’t you?”

“Perfectly. He edits a paper down in Tecumseh, doesn’t he? He did, I know, when I went abroad.”

“Yes. Well, his wife—who was his cousin, Annie Fairchild, and who took the Burfield school after I left it to study law—she happens to be an angel. She is the sort of woman who, when you know her, enables you to understand all the exalted and sublime things that have ever been written about her sex. Well, a year or so after she married Seth and went to live in Tecumseh, she came to hear about poor Jessica Lawton, and her woman’s heart prompted her to hunt the girl up and give her a chance for her life. I don’t know much about what followed—this all happened a good many months ago—but I get a letter now from Seth, telling me that the girl is resolved to come home, and that his wife wants me to do all I can to help her.”

“Well, that’s what I call letting a friend in for a particularly nice thing.”

“Oh, don’t misunderstand me,” said Reuben; “I shall be only too glad if I can serve the poor girl. But how to do it—that’s what troubles me.”

“Her project is a crazy one, to begin with. I wonder that sane people like the Fairchilds should have encouraged it.”

“I don’t think they did. My impression is that they regarded it as unwise and tried to dissuade her from it. Seth doesn’t write as if he thought she would succeed.”

“No, I shouldn’t say there was much danger of it. She will be back again in Tecumseh before Christmas.” After a pause Horace added, in a confidential way: “It’s none of my business, old fellow; but if I were you I’d be careful how I acted in this matter. You can’t afford to be mixed up with her in the eyes of the people here. Of course your motives are admirable, but you know what an overgrown village is for gossip. You won’t be credited with good intentions or any disinterestedness, believe me.”

This seemed to be a new view of the situation to Reuben. He made no immediate answer, but walked along with his gaze bent on the track before him and his hands behind his back. At last he said, with an air of speaking to himself:

“But if one does mean well and is perfectly clear about it in his own mind, how far ought he to allow his course to be altered by the possible misconceptions of others? That opens up a big question, doesn’t it?”

“But you have said that you were not clear about it—that you were all at sea.”

“As to means, yes; but not as to motives.”

“Nobody but you will make the distinction. And you have your practice to consider—the confidence of your clients. Fancy the effect it will have on them—your turning up as the chief friend and patron of a—of the Lawton girl! You can’t afford it.” Reuben looked at his companion again with the same calm, impassive gaze. Then he said slowly: “I can see how the matter presents itself to you. I had thought first of going to the dépôt to meet her; but, on consideration, it seemed better to wait and have a talk with her after she had seen her family. I am going out to their place now.”

The tone in which this announcement was made served to change the topic of conversation. The talk became general again, and Horace turned it upon the subject of the number of lawyers in town, their relative prosperity and value, and the local condition of legal business. He found that he was right in guessing that Mr. Clarke enjoyed Thessaly’s share of the business arising from the Minster ironworks, and that this share was more important than formerly, when all important affairs were in the hands of a New York firm. He was interested, too, in what Reuben Tracy revealed about his own practice.

“Oh, I have nothing to complain of,” Reuben said, in response to a question. “It is a good thing to be kept steadily at work—good for a man’s mind as well as for his pocket. Latterly I have had almost too much to attend to, since the railroad business on this division was put in my charge; and I grumble to myself sometimes over getting so little spare time for reading and for other things I should like to attempt. I suppose a good many of the young lawyers here would call that an ungrateful frame of mind. Some of them have a pretty hard time of it, I am afraid. Occasionally I can put some work in their way; but it isn’t easy, because clients seem to resent having their business handled by unsuccessful men. That would be an interesting thing to trace, wouldn’t it?—the law of the human mind which prompts people to boost a man as soon as he has shown that he can climb without help, and to pull down those who could climb well enough with a little assistance.”

“So you think there isn’t much chance for still another young lawyer to enter the field here?” queried Horace, bringing the discussion back to concrete matters.

“Oh, that’s another thing,” replied Reuben. “There is no earthly reason why you shouldn’t try. There are too many lawyers here, it is true, but then I suppose there are too many lawyers everywhere—except heaven. A certain limited proportion of them always prosper—the rest don’t. It depends upon yourself which class you will be in. Go ahead, and if I can help you in any way I shall be very glad.”

“You’re kind, I’m sure. But, you know, it won’t be as if I came a stranger to the place,” said Horace. “My father’s social connections will help me a good deal”—Horace thought he noted a certain incredulous gesture by his companion here, and wondered at it, but went on—“and then my having studied in Europe ought to count. I have another advantage, too, in being on very friendly terms with Mrs. and Miss Minster. I rode up with them from New York to-day, and we had a long talk. I don’t want anything said about it yet, but it looks mightily as if I were to get the whole law business of the ironworks and of their property in general.”

Young Mr. Boyce did not wince or change color under the meditative gaze with which Reuben regarded him upon hearing this; but he was conscious of discomfort, and he said to himself that his companion’s way of staring like an introspective ox at people was unpleasant.

“That would be a tremendous start for you,” remarked Reuben at last. “I hope you won’t be disappointed in it.”

“It seems a tolerably safe prospect,” answered Horace, lightly. “You say that you’re overworked.”

“Not quite that, but I don’t get as much time as I should like for outside matters. I want to go on the school board here, for example—I see ever so many features of the system which seem to me to be flaws, and which I should like to help remedy—but I can’t spare the time. And then there is the condition of the poor people in the quarter grown up around the iron-works and the factories, and the lack of a good library, and the saloon question, and the way in which the young men and boys of the village spend their evenings, and so on. These are the things I am really interested in; and instead of them I have to devote all my energies to deeds and mortgages and specifications for trestle-works. That’s what I meant.”

“Why don’t you take in a partner? That would relieve you of a good deal of the routine.”

“Do you know, I’ve thought of that more than once lately. I daresay that if the right sort of a young man had been at hand, the idea would have attracted me long ago. But, to tell the truth, there isn’t anybody in Thessaly who meets precisely my idea of a partner—whom I quite feel like taking into my office family, so to speak.”

“Perhaps I may want to talk with you again on this point,” said Horace.

To this Reuben made no reply, and the two walked on for a few moments in silence.

They were approaching a big, ungainly, shabby-looking structure, which presented a receding roof, a row of windows with small, old-fashioned panes of glass, and a broad, rickety veranda sprawling the whole width of its front, to the highway on their left. This had once been a rural wayside tavern, but now, by the encircling growth of the village, it had taken on a hybrid character, and managed to combine in a very complete way the coarse demerits of a town saloon with the evil license of a suburban dive. Its location rendered it independent of most of the restrictions which the village authorities were able to enforce in Thessaly itself, and this freedom from restraint attracted the dissipated imagination of town and country alike. It was Dave Rantell’s place, and being known far and wide as the most objectionable resort in Dearborn County, was in reality much worse than its reputation.

The open sheds at the side of the tavern were filled with horses and sleighs, and others were ranged along at the several posts by the roadside in front—these latter including some smart city cutters, and even a landau on runners. From the farther side of the house came, at brief intervals, the sharp report of rifle-shots, rising loud above the indistinct murmuring of a crowd’s conversation.

“It must be a turkey-shoot,” said Reuben. “This man Rantell has them every year at Thanksgiving and Christmas,” he added, as they came in view of the scene beyond the tavern. “There! Have you seen anything in Europe like that?” Let it be stated without delay that there was no trace of patriotic pride in his tone.

The wide gate of the tavern yard was open, and the path through it had been trampled smooth by many feet. In the yard just beyond were clustered some forty or fifty men, standing about in the snow, and with their backs to the road. Away in the distance, and to the right, were visible two or three slouching figures of men. Traversing laterally and leftward the broad, unbroken field of snow, the eye caught a small, dark object on the great white sheet; if the vision was clear and far-sighted, a closer study would reveal this to be a bird standing alone in the waste of whiteness, tied by the leg to a stake near by, and waiting to be shot at. The attention of every man in the throng was riveted on this remote and solitary fowl. There was a deep hush for a fraction of a second after each shot. Then the turkey either hopped to one side, which meant that the bullet had gone whistling past, or sank to the ground after a brief wild fluttering of wings. In the former case, another loaded rifle was handed out, and suspense began again; in the latter event, there ensued a short intermission devoted to beverages and badinage, the while a boy started across the fields toward the throng with the dead turkey, and the distant slouching figures busied themselves in tying up a new feathered target.

“No, it isn’t what you would call elevating, is it?” said Horace, as the two stood looking over the fence upon the crowd. “Still, it has its interest as a national product. I’ve seen dog-fights and cock-mains in England attended by whole thousands of men, that were ever so much worse than this. If you think of it, this isn’t particularly brutal, as such sports go.”

“But what puzzles me is that men should like such sports at all,” said Reuben.

“At any rate,” replied Horace, “we’re better off in that respect than the English are. The massacre of rats in a pit is a thing that you can get an assemblage of nobility, and even royalty, for, over there. Now, that isn’t even relatively true here. Take this turkey-shoot of Rantell’s, for example. You won’t find any gentlemen here; that is, anybody who sets up to be a gentleman in either the English or the American sense of the word.”

As if in ironical answer, a sharp, strident voice rose above the vague babble of the throng inside the yard, and its accents reached the two young men with painful distinctness:

“I’ll bet five dollars that General Boyce kills his six birds in ten shots—bad cartridges barred!”

CHAPTER V.—THE TURKEY-SHOOT.

The compassionate Reuben was quick to feel the humiliation with which this brawling announcement of the General’s presence must cover the General’s son. It had been apparent to him before that Horace would have to considerably revise the boyish estimate of his father’s position and importance which, he brought back with him from Europe. But it was cruel to have the work of disillusion begun in this rude, blunt form. He tried to soften the effect of the blow.

“It isn’t as bad as all that,” he said, tacitly ignoring what they had just heard. “No doubt some rough people do come to these gatherings; but, on the other hand, if a man is fond of shooting, why, don’t you see, this furnishes him with the best kind of test of his skill. Really, there is no reason why he shouldn’t come—and—besides—”

Reuben was not clever at saying things he did not wholly mean, and his good-natured attempt to gloss over the facts came to an abrupt halt from sheer lack of ideas.

“I suppose I shall have to learn to be a Thessalian all over again,” said Horace. “If you don’t mind, well go in. It’s just as well to see the thing.”

Suiting the action to the word, he moved toward the gate. Reuben hesitated for a moment, and then, with an “All right—for a few minutes”—followed him into the yard. The two young men stood upon the outskirts of the crowd for a time, and then, as opportunity favored, edged their way through until they were a part of the inner half-ring around a table, upon which were rifles, cartridges, cleaning rags, a bottle and some tumblers. At their feet, under and about the table, lay several piles of turkeys. The largest of these heaps, containing some dozen birds, was, as they were furtively informed by a small boy, the property of the “General.”

This gentleman, who stood well to the front of the table, might be pardoned for not turning around to note the presence of new-comers, since he himself had some money wagered on his work. He had on the instant fired his third shot, and stood with the smoking gun lowered, and his eyes fixed on the target in concentrated expectancy. The turkey made a movement and somebody called out “hit!” But the General’s keen vision told him better. “No, it was a line shot,” he said, “a foot too high.” He kept his gaze still fixed on the remote object, mechanically taking the fresh gun which was handed to him, but not immediately raising it to his shoulder.

General Sylvanus—familiarly called “Vane”—Boyce was now close upon sixty, of middle height and a thick and portly figure, and with perfectly white, close-cropped hair and mustache. His face had in its day boasted both regular, well-cut features and a clear complexion. But the skin was now of one uniform florid tint, even to the back of his neck, and the outlines of the profile were blurred and fattened. His gray eyes, as they swept the field of snow, had still their old, sharp, commanding glance, but they looked out from red and puffy lids.

Just as he lifted his gun, an interested bystander professed to discover Horace for the first time, and called out exuberantly: “Why, hello, Hod! I say, ‘Vane, here’s your boy Hod!”

“Oh, here, fair play!” shouted some of the General’s backers; “you mustn’t try that on—spoiling his aim in that way.” Their solicitude was uncalled for.

“Damn my boy Hod, and you too!” remarked the General calmly, raising his rifle with an uninterrupted movement, levelling it with deliberation, firing, and killing his bird.

Amid the hum of conversation which arose at this, the General turned, laid his gun down, and stepped across the space to where Horace and Reuben stood.

“Well, my lad,” he said heartily, shaking his son’s hand, “I’m glad to see you back. I’d have been at the dépôt to meet you, only I had this match on with Blodgett, and the money was up. I hope you didn’t mind my damning you just now—I daresay I haven’t enough influence to have it do you much harm—and it was Grigg’s scheme to rattle my nerve just as I was going to shoot. How are you, anyway? How de do, Tracy? What’ll you both drink? This is rye whiskey here, but they’ll bring out anything else you want.”

“I’ll take a mouthful of this,” said Horace; “hold on, not so much.” He poured back some of the generous portion which had been given him, and touched glasses with his father.

“You’re sure you won’t have anything, Tracy?” said the General. “No? You don’t know what’s good for you. Standing around in the cold here, a man needs something.”

“But I’m not going to stand around in the cold,” answered Reuben with a half-smile. “I must be going on in a moment or two.”

“Don’t go yet,” said the General, cheerily, as he put down his glass and took up the gun. “Wait and see me shoot my score. I’ve got the range now.”

“You’ve got to kill every bird but one, now, General,” said one of his friends, in admonition.

“All right; don’t be afraid,” replied the champion, in a confident tone.

But it turned out not to be all right. The seventh shot was a miss, and so was the tenth, upon which, as the final and conclusive one, great interest hung. Some of those who had lost money by reason of their faith in the General seemed to take it to heart, but the General himself displayed no sign of gloom. He took another drink, and then emptied his pockets of all the bank-bills they contained, and distributed them among his creditors with perfect amiability. There was not enough money to go around, evidently, for he called out in a pleasant voice to his son:

“Come here a minute, Hod. Have you got thirty dollars loose in your pocket? I’m that much short.” He pushed about the heap of limp turkeys on the snow under the table with one foot, in amused contemplation, and added: “These skinny wretches have cost us about nine dollars apiece. You might at least have fed ’em a trifle better, Dave.”

Horace produced the sum mentioned and handed it over to his father with a somewhat subdued, not to say rueful, air. He did not quite like the way in which the little word “us” had been used.

While the General was light-heartedly engaged in apportioning out his son’s money, and settling his bill, a new man came up, and, taking a rifle in his hands, inquired the price of a shot. He was told that it was ten cents, and to this information was added with cold emphasis the remark that before he fooled with the guns he must put down his money.

“Oh, I’ve got the coin fast enough,” said the newcomer, ringing four dimes on the table.

“Wait a moment,” said Horace to his father and Reuben, who were about to quit the yard. “Let’s watch Ben Lawton shoot. I might as well see the last of my half-dollar. He’s had one drink out of it already.”

Lawton lifted the gun as if he were accustomed to firearms, and after he had made sure of his footing on the hard-trodden snow, took a long, careful aim, and fired. It was with evident sorrow that he saw the snow fly a few feet to one side of the turkey. He decided to have only two shots more, and one drink, and the drink first—a drink of such full and notable dimensions that Dave Rantell was half-tempted to intervene between the cup and the lip. The two shots which followed were very good shots indeed—one of them even seemed to have cut some feathers into the air—but they killed no turkey.

Poor Ben looked for a long time after his last bullet, as if in some vague hope that it might have paused on the way, and would resume its fatal course in due season. Then he laid the rifle down with a deep sigh, and walked slowly out, with his hands plunged dejectedly into his trousers pockets, and his shoulders more rounded than ever. The habitual expression of helpless melancholy which his meagre, characterless visage wore was deepened now to despair.

“Well, Ben,” said Horace to him, as he shuffled past them, “you were right. You might just as well have hung around the dépôt, and let some one else carry my things. You’ve got no more to show for it now than if you had.”

The young man spoke in the tone of easy, paternal banter which prosperous people find it natural to adopt toward their avowedly weak and foolish brethren, and it did not occur to Lawton to resent it. He stopped, and lifted his head just high enough to look in a gloomy way at Horace and his companions for a moment; then he dropped it again and turned to resume his course without answering. On second thought he halted, and without again looking up, groaned out:

“There ain’t another such a darned worthless fool as I be in the whole darned county. I don’t know what I’ll say to her. I’m a good mind not to go home at all. Here I was, figurin’ on havin’ a real Thanksgiving dinner for her, to try and make her feel glad she’d come back amongst us again; and if I’d saved my money and fired all five shots, I’d a got a bird, sure—and that’s what makes me so blamed mad. It’s always my darned luck!”

While he spoke a boy came up to them, dragging a hand-sled upon which General Boyce’s costly collection of poultry was piled. Horace stopped the lad, and took from the top of the heap two of the best of the fowls.

“Here, Ben,” he said, “take these home with you. We’ve got more than we know what to do with. We should only give them away to people who didn’t need them.”

Lawton had been moved almost to tears by the force of his self-depreciatory emotions. His face brightened now on the instant, as he grasped the legs of the turkeys and felt their weight. He looked satisfiedly down at their ruffling circumference of blue-black feathers, and at their pimply pink heads dragging sidewise on the snow.

“You’re a regular brick, Hod,” he said, with more animation than it was his wont to display. “They’ll be tickled to death down to the house. I’m obliged to you, and so she’ll be—”

He stopped short, weighed the birds again in his hand with a saddened air, and held them out toward Horace. All the joy had gone out of his countenance and tone.

“No; I’m much obliged to you, Hod, but I can’t take ’em,” he said, with pathetic reluctance.

“Nonsense!” replied the young man, curtly. “Don’t make a fool of yourself twice in the same afternoon. Of course you’ll take them. Only go straight home with them, instead of selling them for drinks.”

Horace turned upon his heel as he spoke and rejoined his father and Reuben, who had walked on slowly ahead. The General had been telling his companion some funny story, and his eyes were still twinkling with merriment as his son came up, and he repeated to him the gist of his humorous narrative.

Horace did not seem to appreciate the joke, and kept a serious face even at the most comical part of the anecdote. This haunting recurrence of the Lawton business, as he termed it in his thoughts, annoyed him; and still more was he disturbed and vexed by what he had seen of his father. During his previous visit to Thessaly upon his return from Europe, some months before, the General had been leading a temperate and almost monastic life under the combined restraints of rheumatism and hay-fever, and this present revelation of his tastes and habits came therefore in the nature of a surprise to Horace. The latter was unable to find any elements of pleasure in this surprise, and scowled at the snow accordingly, instead of joining in his father’s laughter. Besides, the story was not altogether of the kind which sits with most dignity on paternal lips.

The General noted his son’s solemnity and deferred to it. “I’m glad you gave that poor devil the turkeys,” he said. “I suppose they’re as poor as they make ’em. Only—what do you think, Tracy; as long as I’d shot all the birds, I might have been consulted, eh, about giving them away?”

The query was put in a jocular enough tone, but it grated upon the young man’s mood. “I don’t think the turkey business is one that either of us particularly shines in,” he replied, with a snap in his tone. “You say that your turkeys cost you nine dollars apiece. Apparently I am by way of paying fifteen dollars each for my two.”

“‘By way of’—that’s an English expression, isn’t it?” put in Reuben, hastily, to avert the threatened domestic dispute. “I’ve seen it in novels, but I never heard it used before.”

The talk was fortunately turned at this from poultry to philology; and the General, though he took no part in the conversation, evinced no desire to return to the less pleasant subject. Thus the three walked on to the corner where their ways separated. As they stood here for the parting moment, Reuben said in an aside to Horace:

“That was a kindly act of yours—to give Lawton the turkeys. I can’t tell you how much it pleased me. Those little things show the character of a man. If you like to come down to my office Friday, and are still of the same mind about a partnership, we will talk it over.”

CHAPTER VI.—THANKSGIVING AT THE MINSTERS’.

I REMEMBER having years ago been introduced to one of America’s richest men, as he sat on the broad veranda of a Saratoga hotel in the full glare of the morning sunlight. It is evident that at such a solemn moment I should have been filled with valuable and impressive reflections; yet, such is the perversity and wrong-headedness of the human mind, I could for the life of me evolve no weightier thought than this: “Here is a man who can dispose of hundreds of millions of dollars by a nod of the head, yet cannot with all this countless wealth command a dye for his whiskers which will not turn violet in the sunshine!”

The sleek and sober-visaged butler who moved noiselessly about the dining-room of the Minster household may have had some such passing vision of the vanity of riches, as he served what was styled a Thanksgiving dinner. Vast as the fortune was, it could not surround that board with grateful or lighthearted people upon even this selected festal day.

The room itself must have dampened any but the most indomitably cheerful spirits. It had a sombre and formal aspect, to which the tall oleanders and dwarf palms looking through the glass on the conservatory side lent only an added sense of coldness. The furniture was of dark oak and even darker leather; the walls were panelled in two shades of the same serious tint; the massive, carved sideboard and the ponderous mantel declined to be lifted out of their severe dignity by such trivial accessories as silver and rare china and vases of flowers. There were pictures in plenty, and costly lace curtains inside the heavy outer hangings at the windows, and pretty examples of embroidery here and there which would have brightened any less resolutely grave environment: in this room they went for nothing, or next to nothing.

Four women sat at this Thanksgiving dinner, and each, being in her own heart conscious of distinct weariness, politely took it for granted that the others were enjoying their meal.

Talk languished, or fitfully flared up around some strictly uninteresting subject with artificial fervor the while the butler was in the room. His presence in the house was in the nature of an experiment, and Mrs. Minster from time to time eyed him in a furtive way, and then swiftly turned her glance aside on the discovery that he was eying her. Probably he was as good as other butlers, she reflected; he was undoubtedly English, and he had come to her well recommended by a friend in New York. But she was unaccustomed to having a man servant in the dining-room, and it jarred upon her to call him by his surname, which was Cozzens, instead of by the more familiar Daniel or Patrick as she did the gardener and the coachman. Before he came—a fortnight or so ago—she had vaguely thought of him as in livery; but the idea of seeing him in anything but what she called a “dress suit,” and he termed “evening clothes,” had been definitely abandoned. What she chiefly wished about him now was that he would not look at her all the time.

Mrs. Minster, being occupied in this way, contributed very little to what conversation there was during the dinner. It was not her wont to talk much at any time. She was perhaps a trifle below the medium height of her sex, full-figured rather than stout, and with a dark, capable, and altogether singular face, in which the most marked features were a proud, thin-lipped mouth, which in repose closed tight and drew downward at the corners; small black eyes, that had an air of seeing very cleverly through things; and a striking arrangement of her prematurely white hair, which was brushed straight from the forehead over a high roll. From a more or less careful inspection of this face, even astute people were in the habit of concluding that Mrs. Minster was a clever and haughty woman. In truth, she was neither. Her reserve was due in part to timidity, in part to lack of interest in the matters which seemed to concern those with whom she was most thrown into contact outside her own house. Her natural disposition had been the reverse of unkindly, but it included an element of suspicion, which the short and painful career of her son, and the burden of responsibility for a great estate, had tended unduly to develop. She did not like many of the residents of Thessaly, yet it had never occurred to her to live elsewhere. If the idea had dawned in her mind, she would undoubtedly have picked out as an alternative her native village on the Hudson, where her Dutch ancestors had lived from early colonial times. The life of a big city had never become even intelligible to her, much less attractive. She went to the Episcopal church regularly, although she neither professed nor felt any particular devotion to religious ideals or tenets. She gave of her substance generously, though not profusely, to all properly organized and certified charities, but did not look about for, or often recognize when they came in her way, subjects for private benefaction. She applied the bulk of her leisure time to the writing of long and perfectly commonplace letters to female relatives in various sections of the Republic. She was profoundly fond of her daughters, but was rarely impelled to demonstrative proofs of this affection. Very often she grew tired of inaction, mental and physical; but she accepted this without murmuring as a natural and proper result of her condition in life, much as one accepts an uncomfortable sense of repletion after a dinner. When she did not know what else to do, she ordinarily took a nap.

It must have been by the law of oppositive attraction that her chosen intimate was Miss Tabitha Wilcox, the spare and angular little lady who sat across the table from her, the sole guest at the Thanksgiving dinner. The most vigorous imagination could not conceive her in the act of dozing for so much as an instant during hours when others kept awake. Vigilant observation and an unwearying interest in affairs were written in every line of her face: you could read them in her bright, sharp eyes; in the alert, almost anxious posture of her figure; in the very conformation of the little rows of iron-gray curls, which mounted like circular steps above each ear. She was a kindly soul, was Miss Tabitha, who could not listen unmoved to any tale of honest suffering, and who gave of her limited income to the poor with more warmth than prudence.

Her position in Thessaly was a unique one. She belonged, undoubtedly, to the first families, for her grandfather, Judge Abijah Wilcox, had been one of the original settlers, in those halcyon years following the close of the Revolution, when the good people of Massachusetts and Connecticut swarmed, uninvited, across the Hudson, and industriously divided up among themselves the territorial patrimony of the slow and lackadaisical Dutchmen. Miss Tabitha still lived in the roomy old house which the judge had built; she sat in one of the most prominent pews in the Episcopal church, and her prescriptive right to be president of the Dorcas Mite Society had not been questioned now these dozen years. Although she was far from being wealthy, her place in the very best and most exclusive society of Thessaly was taken for granted by everybody. But Miss Tabitha was herself not at all exclusive. She knew most of the people in the village: only the insuperable limitations of time and space prevented her knowing them all. And not even these stern barriers availed to bound her information concerning alike acquaintances and strangers. There were persons who mistook her eager desire to be of service in whatever was going forward for meddlesomeness. Some there were who even resented her activity, and thought of her as a malevolent old gossip. These latter were deeply in the wrong. Miss Tabitha loved everybody, and had never consciously done injury to any living soul. As for gossip, she could no more help talking than the robin up in the elm boughs of a sunny April morning can withhold the song that is in him.

It has been said that the presence of the butler threw a gloom over the dinner-party. It did not silence Miss Tabitha, but at least she felt constrained to discourse upon general and impersonal subjects while he was in hearing. The two daughters of the house, who faced each other at the ends of the table, asked her questions or offered comments at intervals, and once or twice their mother spoke. All ate from the plates that were set before them, in a perfunctory way, without evidence of appreciation. There was some red wine in a decanter on the table—I fancy none of them could have told precisely what it was—and of this Miss Tabitha drank a little, diluted with water. The two girls had allowed the butler to fill their glasses as well, and from time to time they made motions as of sipping from these, merely to keep their guest in company. Mrs. Minster had no wine-glasses at her plate, and drank ice-water. Every time that any one of the others lifted the wine to her lips, a common thought seemed to flash through the minds around the table—the memory of the son and heir who had died from drink.

When the butler, with an accession of impressiveness in his reserved demeanor, at last handed around plates containing each its thin layer of pale meat, Ethel Minster was moved to put into words what all had been feeling:

“Mamma, this isn’t like Thanksgiving at all!” she said, with the freedom of a favorite child; “it was ever so much nicer to have the turkey on the table where we could all see him, and pick out in our minds what part we would especially like. To have the carving done outside, and only slices of the breast brought in to us—it is as if we were away from home somewhere, in a hotel among strangers.”

Mrs. Minster, by way of answer, looked at the butler, the glance being not so much an inquiry as a reference of the matter to one who was a professor of this particular sort of thing. Her own inclination jumped with that of her daughter, but the possession of a butler entailed certain responsibilities, which must be neither ignored nor evaded. Happily Cozzens’s mind was not wholly inelastic. He uttered no word, but, with a slight obeisance which comprehended mistress and daughter and guest in careful yet gracious gradations of significance, went out, and presently returned with a huge dish, which he set in front of Mrs. Minster. He brought the carving instruments, and dignifiedly laid them in their place, as a chamberlain might invest a queen with her sceptre. Even when Miss Kate said, “If we need you any more, Cozzens, we will ring,” he betrayed neither surprise nor elation, but bowed again gravely, and left the room, closing the door noiselessly behind him.

“I am sure he will turn out a perfect jewel,” said Miss Tabitha. “You were very fortunate to get him.”

“But there are times,” said Kate, “when one likes to take off one’s rings, even if the stones are perfection itself.”

This guarded reference to the fact that Mrs. Minster had secured an admirable servant who was a nuisance at small feminine dinner-parties sufficed to dismiss the subject. Miss Tabitha assumed on the moment a more confidential manner and tone:

“I wonder if you’ve heard,” she said, “that young Horace Boyce has come back. Why, now I think of it, he must have come up in your train.”

“He was in our car,” replied Mrs. Minster. “He sat by us, and talked all the way up. I never heard a man’s tongue run on so in all my born days.”

“He takes that from his grandmother Beekman,” explained Miss Tabitha, by way of parenthesis. “She was something dreadful: talking ‘thirteen to the dozen’ doesn’t begin to express it. You don’t remember her. She went down to New York when I was a mere slip of a girl, to have a set of false teeth fitted—they were a novelty in those days—and it was winter time, and she wouldn’t listen to the dentist’s advice to keep her mouth shut, and she caught cold, and it turned into lockjaw, and that was the last of her. It was just after her daughter Julia had been married to young Sylvanus Boyce. Dear me, how time flies! I can remember her old bombazine gown and her black Spanish mits, and her lace cap on one side of her head, as if it were only yesterday. And here Julia’s been dead twenty years and more, and her grown-up son’s come home from Europe, and the General—”

The old maid stopped short, because her sentence could not be charitably finished. “How did you like Horace?” she asked, to shift the subject, and looking at Kate Minster.

The tall, dark girl with the rich complexion and the beautiful, proud eyes glanced up at her questioner impatiently, as if disposed to resent the inquiry. Then she seemed to reflect that no offence could possibly have been intended, for she answered pleasantly enough:

“He seemed an amiable sort of person; and I should judge he was clever, too. He always was a smart boy—I think that is the phrase. He talked to mamma most of the time.”

“How can you say that, Kate? I’m sure it was because you scarcely answered him at all, and read your book—which was not very polite.”

“I was afraid to venture upon anything more than monosyllables with him,” said Kate, “or I should have been ruder still. I should have had to tell him that I did not like Americans who made the accident of their having been to Europe an excuse for sneering at those who haven’t been there, and that would have been highly impolite, wouldn’t it?”

“I don’t think he sneered,” replied Mrs. Minster. “I thought he tried to be as affable and interesting as he knew how. Pray what did he say that was sneering?”

“Oh, dear me, I don’t in the least remember what he said. It was his tone, I think, more than any special remark. He had an air of condoling with me because he had seen so many things that I have only read about; and he patronized the car, and the heating-apparatus, and the conductor, and the poor little black porter, and all of us.”

“He was a pretty boy. Does he hold his own, now he’s grown up?” asked Miss Tabitha. “He used to favor the Boyce side a good deal.”

“I should say he favored the Boyce side to the exclusion of everybody else’s side,” said Kate, with a little smile at her own conceit, “particularly his own individual section of it. He is rather tall, with light hair, light eyes, light mustache, light talk, light everything; and he looks precisely like all the other young men you see in New York nowadays, with their coats buttoned in just such a way, and their gloves of just such a shade, and a scarf of just such a shape with the same kind of pin in it, and their hats laid sidewise in the rack so that you can observe that they have a London maker’s brand in-side. There! you have his portrait to a t. Do you recognize it?”

“What will poor countrified Thessaly ever do with such a metropolitan model as this?” asked Ethel. “We shall all be afraid to go out in the street, for fear he should discover us to be out of the fashion.”

“Oh, he is not going to stay here,” said Mrs. Minster. “He told us that he had decided to enter some law firm in New York. It seems a number of very flattering openings have been offered him.”

“I happen to know,” put in Miss Tabitha, “that he is going to stay here. What is more, he has as good as struck up a partnership with Reuben Tracy. I had it this morning from a lady whose brother-in-law is extremely intimate with the General.”

“That is very curious,” mused Mrs. Minster. “He certainly talked yesterday of settling in New York, and mentioned the offers he had had, and his doubt as to which to accept.”

“Are you sure, mamma,” commented Kate, “that he wasn’t talking merely to hear himself talk?”

“I like the looks of that Reuben Tracy,” interposed Ethel. “He always suggests the idea that he is the kind of man you could tie something to, and come back hours afterward and find it all there just as you had left it.”

The girl broke into an amused laugh at the appearance of this metaphor, when she had finished it, and the others joined in her gayety. Under the influence of this much-needed enlivenment, Miss Tabitha took another piece of turkey and drank some of her wine and water. They began talking about Tracy.

“It will be a good thing for Horace Boyce,” said Miss Tabitha. “He couldn’t have a steadier or better partner for business. They tell me that Tracy handles more work, as it is, than any other two lawyers in town. He’s a very good-hearted man too, and charitable, as everybody will admit who knows him. What a pity it is that he doesn’t take an interest in church affairs, and rent a pew, and set an example to young men in that way.”

“On the contrary, I sometimes think, Tabitha,” said Miss Kate, idly crumbling the bread on the cloth before her, “that it is worth while to have an occasional good man or woman altogether outside the Church. They prevent those on the inside from getting too conceited about their own virtues. There would be no living with the parsons and the deacons and the rest if you couldn’t say to them now and then: ‘See, you haven’t a monopoly of goodness. Here are people just as honest and generous and straightforward as you are yourselves, who get along without any altar or ark whatever.’”

Mrs. Minster looked at her daughter with an almost imperceptible lifting of the brows. Her comment had both apology and mild reproof in it:

“To hear Kate talk, one would think she was a perfect atheist. She is always defending infidels and such people. I am sure I can’t imagine where she takes it from.”

“Why, mamma!” protested the girl, “who has said anything about infidels? We have no earthly right to brand people with that word, simply because we don’t see them going to church as we do. We none of us know this Mr. Tracy to even bow to him—at least I don’t—and we know no more about his religious opinions than we do about—what shall I say?—about the man in the moon. But I have heard others speak of him frequently, and always with respect. I wasn’t defending him. Why should I? I merely said it was worth while to keep in mind that men could be good without renting a pew in church.”

“I don’t like to hear you speak against religion, that is all,” replied the mother, placidly. “It isn’t—ladylike.”

“And if you come to inquire,” interposed Miss Tabitha, speaking with great gentleness, as of one amiably admonishing impetuous and ill-informed youth, “you will generally find that there is something not quite as it should be about these people who are so sure that they need no help to be good. Only last evening Sarah Cheeseborough told me something about your Mr. Tracy—”

“My Mr. Tracy!”

“Well, about the Mr. Tracy, then, that she saw with her own eyes. I would scarcely have believed it. It only goes to show what poor worms the best of us are, if we just rely upon our own strength alone.”

“What was it?” asked Mrs. Minster, with a slight show of interest.

Miss Tabitha by way of answer threw a meaning glance at the two girls, and discreetly took a sip of her wine and water.

“Oh, don’t mind us, Tabitha!” said Kate. “I am twenty-three, and Ethel is nearly twenty, and we are allowed to sit up at the table quite as if we were grown people.”

The sarcasm was framed in pleasantry, and Miss Tabitha took it in smiling good part, with no further pretence of reservation.

“Well, then, you must know that Ben Lawton—he’s a shiftless sort of coot who lives out in the hollow, and picks up odd jobs; the sort of people who were brought up on the canal, and eat woodchucks—Ben Lawton has a whole tribe of daughters. Some of them work around among the farmers, and some are in the button factory, and some are at home doing nothing; and the oldest of the lot, she ran away from here five years ago or so, and went to Tecumseh. She was a good-looking girl—she worked one season for my sister near Tyre, and I really liked her looks—but she went altogether to the dogs, and, as I say, quit these parts, everybody supposed for good. But, lo and behold! what must she do but turn up again like a bad penny, after all this time, and, now I think of it, come back on the very train you travelled by, yesterday, too!”

“There is nothing very remarkable about that,” commented Kate. “So far as I have seen, one doesn’t have to show a certificate of character to buy a railway ticket. The man at the window scowls upon the just and the unjust with impartial incivility.”

“Just wait,” continued Miss Tabitha, impressively, “wait till you have heard all! This girl—Jess Lawton, they call her—drove home on the express-sleigh with her father right in broad daylight. And who do you think followed up there on foot—in plain sight, too—and went into the house, and stayed there a full half hour? Why, the immaculate Mr. Tracy! Sarah Cheeseborough saw him pass the place, and watched him go into their house—you can see across lots from her side windows to where the Lawtons live—and just for curiosity she kept track of the time. The girl hadn’t been home an hour before he made his appearance, and Sarah vows she hasn’t seen him on that road before in years. Now what do you think?”

“I think Sarah Cheesborough might profitably board up her side windows. It would help her to concentrate her mind on her own business,” said Kate. Her sister Ethel carried this sentiment farther by adding: “So do I! She is a mean, meddlesome old cat. I’ve heard you say so yourself, Tabitha.”

The two elder ladies took a different view of the episode, and let it be seen; but Mrs. Minster seized the earliest opportunity of changing the topic of conversation, and no further mention was made during the afternoon of either Reuben Tracy or the Lawtons.

The subject was, indeed, brought up later on, when the two girls were alone together in the little boudoir connecting their apartments. Pale-faced Ethel sat before the fire, dreamily looking into the coals, while her sister stood behind her, brushing out and braiding for the night the younger maiden’s long blonde hair.

“Do you know, Kate,” said Ethel, after a long pause, “it hurt me almost as if that Mr. Tracy had been a friend of ours, when Tabitha told about him and—and that woman. It is so hard to have to believe evil of everybody. You would like to think well of some particular person whom you have seen—just as a pleasant fancy of the mind—and straightway they come and tell odious things about him. Didn’t it annoy you? And did you believe it?” Kate drew the ivory brush slowly over the flowing, soft-brown ringlets lying across her hand, again and again, but kept silence until Ethel repeated her latter question. Then she said, evasively:

“When we get to be old maids, we sha’n’t spend our time in collecting people’s shortcomings, as boys collect postage-stamps, shall we, dear?”

CHAPTER VII.—THE PRODIGAL DAUGHTER’S WELCOME.

The President of the United States, that year, had publicly professed himself of the opinion that “the maintenance of pacific relations with all the world, the fruitful increase of the earth, the rewards accruing to honest toil throughout the land, and the nation’s happy immunity from pestilence, famine, and disastrous visitations of the elements,” deserved exceptional recognition at the hands of the people on the last Thursday in November. The Governor of the State went further, both in rhetorical exuberance and in his conception of benefits received, for he enumerated “the absence of calamitous strife between capital and labor,” “the patriotic spirit which had dominated the toilers of the mine, the forge, the factory, and the mill, in their judicious efforts to unite and organize their common interests,” and “the wise and public-spirited legislation which in the future, like a mighty bulwark, would protect the great and all-important agricultural community from the debasing competition of unworthy wares”—as among the other things for which everybody should be thankful.

There were many, no doubt, who were conscious of a kindly glow as they read beneath the formal words designating the holiday, and caught the pleasant and gracious significance of the Thanksgiving itself—strange and perverted survival as it is of a gloomy and unthankful festival. There were others, perhaps, who smiled a little at his Excellency’s shrewd effort to placate the rising and hostile workingmen’s movement and get credit from the farmers for the recent oleomargarine bill, and for the rest took the day merely as a welcome breathing spell, with an additional drink or two in the forenoon, and a more elaborate dinner than was usual.

In the Lawton household they troubled their heads neither about the text and tricks of the proclamations nor the sweet and humane meaning of the day. There were much more serious matters to think of.

The parable of the Prodigal Son has long been justly regarded as a model of terse and compact narrative; but modern commentators of the analytical sort have a quarrel with the abruptness of its ending. They would have liked to learn what the good stay-at-home son said and did after his father had for a second time explained the situation to him. Did he, at least outwardly, agree that “it was meet that we should make merry and be glad”? And if he consented to go into the house, and even to eat some of the fatted calf, did he do it with a fine, large, hearty pretence of being glad? Did he deceive the returned Prodigal, for example, into believing in the fraternal welcome? Or did he lie in wait, and, when occasion offered, quietly, and with a polite smile, rub gall and vinegar into the wayfarer’s wounds? Alas, this we can only guess.

Poor Ben Lawton had been left in no doubt as to the attitude of his family toward the prodigal daughter. A sharp note of dissent had been raised at the outset, on the receipt of her letter—a note so shrill and strenuous that for the moment it almost scared him into begging her not to come. Then his better nature asserted itself, and he contrived to mollify somewhat the wrath of his wife and daughters by inventing a tortuous system of lies about Jessica’s intentions and affairs. He first established the fiction that she meant only to pay them a flying visit. Upon this he built a rambling edifice of falsehood as to her financial prosperity, and her desire to do a good deal toward helping the family. Lastly, as a crowning superstructure of deception, he fabricated a theory that she was to bring with her a lot of trunks filled with costly and beautiful dresses, with citified bonnets and parasols and high-heeled shoes, beyond belief—all to be distributed among her sisters. Once well started, he lied so luxuriantly and with such a flowing fancy about these things, that his daughters came to partially believe him—him whom they had not believed before since they could remember—and prepared themselves to be civil to their half-sister.

There were five of these girls—the offspring of a second marriage Lawton contracted a year or so after the death of baby Jessica’s mother. The eldest, Melissa, was now about twenty, and worked out at the Fairchild farm-house some four miles from Thessaly—a dull, discontented young woman, with a heavy yet furtive face and a latent snarl in her voice. Lucinda was two years younger, and toiled in the Scotch-cap factory in the village. She also was a commonplace girl, less obviously bad-tempered than Melissa, but scarcely more engaging in manner. Next in point of age was Samantha, who deserves some notice by herself, and after her came the twins, Georgiana and Arabella, two overgrown, coarse, giggling hoydens of fifteen, who obtained intermittent employment in the button factory.

Miss Samantha, although but seventeen, had for some time been tacitly recognized as the natural leader of the family. She did no work either in factory or on farm, and the local imagination did not easily conceive a condition of things in which she could find herself reduced to the strait of manual labor. Her method, baldly stated, was to levy more or less reluctant contributions upon whatever the rest of the family brought in. There was a fiction abroad that Samantha stayed at home to help her mother. The facts were that she was only visible at the Law-ton domicile at meal-times and during inclement weather, and that her mother was rather pleased than otherwise at this being the case.

Samantha was of small and slight figure, with a shrewd, prematurely-sapient face that was interesting rather than pretty, and with an eye which, when it was not all demure innocence, twinkled coldly like that of a rodent of prey. She had several qualities of mind and deportment which marked her as distinct from the mass of village girls; that which was most noticeable, perhaps, was her ability to invent and say sharp, comical, and cuttingly sarcastic things without herself laughing at them. This was felt to be a rare attainment indeed in Thessaly, and its possession gave her much prestige among the young people of both sexes, who were conscious of an insufficient command alike over their tongues and their boisterous tendencies. Samantha could have counted her friends, in the true, human sense of the word, upon her thumbs; but of admirers and toadies she swayed a regiment. Her own elder sisters, Melissa and Lucinda, alternated between sulky fear of her and clumsy efforts at propitiation; the junior twins had never as yet emerged from a plastic state of subordination akin to reverence. Samantha’s attitude toward them all was one of lofty yet observant criticism, relieved by lapses into half-satirical, half-jocose amiability as their pay-days approached. On infrequent occasions she developed a certain softness of demeanor toward her father, but to her mother she had been uniformly and contemptuously uncivil for years.

Of this mother, the second Mrs. Lawton, there is little enough to say. She was a pallid, ignorant, helpless slattern, gaunt of frame, narrow of forehead, and bowed and wrinkled before her time. Like her husband, she came of an ancestry of lake and canal boatmen; and though twenty odd years had passed since increasing railroad competition forced her parents to abandon their over-mortgaged scow and seek a living in the farm country, and she married the young widower Ben Lawton in preference to following them, her notions of housekeeping and of existence generally had never expanded beyond the limits of a canal-boat cabin. She rose at a certain hour, maundered along wearily through such tasks of the day as forced themselves upon her, and got to bed again as early as might be, inertly thankful that the day was done. She rarely went out upon the street, and still more rarely had any clothes fit to go out in. She had a vague pride in her daughter Samantha, who seemed to her to resemble the heroines of the continued stories which she assiduously followed in the Fireside Weekly, and sometimes she harbored a formless kind of theory that if her baby boy Alonzo had lived, things would have been different; but her interest in the rest of the family was of the dimmest and most spasmodic sort. In England she would have taken to drink, and been beaten for it, and thus at least extracted from life’s pilgrimage some definite sensations. As it was, she lazily contributed vile cooking, a foully-kept house, and a grotesque waste of the pittances which came into her hands, to the general squalor which hung like an atmosphere over the Lawtons.

The house to which Jessica had come with her father the previous afternoon was to her a strange abode. At the time of her flight, five years before, the family had lived on a cross-road some miles away; at present they were encamped, so to speak, in an old and battered structure which had been a country house in its time, but was now in the centre of a new part of Thessaly built up since war. The building, with its dingy appearance and poverty-stricken character, was an eyesore to the neighborhood, and everybody looked hopefully forward to the day when the hollow in which it stood should be filled up, and the house and its inhabitants cleared away out of sight.

Jessica upon her arrival had been greeted with constrained coolness by her stepmother, who did not even offer to kiss her, but shook hands limply instead, and had been ushered up to her room by her father. It was a low and sprawling chamber, with three sides plastered, and the fourth presenting a time-worn surface of naked lathing. In it were a bed, an old chest of drawers, a wooden chair, and a square piece of rag carpet just large enough to emphasize the bareness of the surrounding floor. This was the company bedroom; and after Ben had brought up all her belongings and set them at the foot of the bed, and tiptoed his way down-stairs again, Jessica threw herself into the chair in the centre of its cold desolation, and wept vehemently.

There came after a time, while she still sat sobbing in solitude, a soft rap at her door. When it was repeated, a moment later, she hastily attempted to dry her eyes, and answered, “Come in.” Then the door opened, and the figure of Samantha appeared. She was smartly dressed, and she had a half-smile on her face. She advanced readily toward the chair.

“Don’t you know me?” she said, as Jessica rose and looked at her doubtfully in the fading light. “I’m Samantha. Of course, I’ve grown a good deal; but Lord! I’d have known you anywhere. I’m glad to see you.”

Her tone betrayed no extravagance of heated enthusiasm, but still it was a welcome in its way; and as the two girls kissed each other, Jessica choked down the last of her sobs, and was even able to smile a little.

“Yes, I think I should have known you,” she replied. “Oh, now I look at you, of course I should. Yes, you’ve grown into a fine girl. I’ve thought of you very, very often.”

“I’ll bet not half as often as I’ve thought of you,” Samantha made answer, cheerfully. “You’ve been living in a big city, where there’s plenty to take up your time; but it gets all-fired slow down here sometimes, and then there’s nothing to do but to envy them that’s been able to get out.”

Samantha had been moving the small pieces of luggage at the foot of the bed with her feet as she spoke. With her eyes still on them she asked, in a casual way:

“Father gone for the rest of your things? It’s like him to make two jobs of it.”

“This is all I have brought; there is nothing more,” said Jessica.

“What!”

Samantha was eying her sister with open-mouthed incredulity. She stammered forth, after a prolonged pause of mental confusion:

“You mean to say you ain’t brought any swell dresses, or fancy bonnets, or silk wrappers, or sealskins, or—or anything? Why, dad swore you was bringing whole loads of that sort of truck with you!” She added, as if in angry quest for consolation: “Well, there’s one comfort, he always was a liar!”

“I’m sorry if you’re disappointed,” said Jessica, stiffly; “but this is all I’ve brought, and I can’t help it.”

“But you must have had no end of swell things,” retorted the younger girl. “It stands to reason you must. I know that much. And what have you done with ’em?” She broke out in loud satire: “Oh, yes! A precious lot you thought about me and the rest of us! I daresay it kept you awake nights, thinking about us so much!”

Jessica gazed in painful astonishment at this stripling girl, who had regarded her melancholy home-coming merely in the light of a chance to enjoy some cast-off finery. All the answers that came into her head were too bitter and disagreeable. She did not trust herself to reply, but, still wearing her hat and jacket, walked to the window and looked out down the snowy road. The impulse was strong within her to leave the house on the instant.

Samantha had gone away, slamming the door viciously behind her, and Jessica stood for a long time at the window, her mind revolving in irregular and violent sequence a score of conflicting plans and passionate notions. There were moments in this gloomy struggle of thought when she was tempted to throw everything to the winds—her loyalty to pure-souled Annie Fairchild, her own pledges to herself, her hopes and resolves for the future, everything—and not try any more. And when she had put these evil promptings behind her, that which remained was only less sinister.

As she stood thus, frowning down through the unwashed panes at the white, cheerless prospect, and tearing her heart in the tumultuous revery of revolt, the form of a man advancing up the road came suddenly under her view. He stopped when he was in front of the Lawton house, and looked inquiringly about him. The glance which he directed upwards fell full upon her at the window. The recognition was mutual, and he turned abruptly from the road and came toward the house. Jessica hurriedly took off her hat and cloak. Reuben Tracy had come to see her!

It was her stepmother who climbed the stairs to notify her, looking more lank and slatternly than ever, holding the bedroom door wide open, and saying sourly: “There’s a man down-stairs to see you already,” as if the visit were an offence, and Jessica could not pretend to be surprised. “Yes, I saw him,” she answered, and hurried past Mrs. Lawton, and down to the gaunt, dingy front room, with its bare walls, scant furniture, and stoveless discomfort, which not even Samantha dared call a parlor.

She could remember afterward that Reuben stood waiting for her with his hat in his left hand, and that he had taken the glove from his right to shake hands with her; and this she recalled more distinctly than anything else. He had greeted her with grave kindness, had mentioned receiving notice from the Fairchilds of her coming, and had said that of course whatever he could do to help her he desired to do. Then there had been a pause, during which she vaguely wavered between a wish that he had not come, and a wild, childish longing to hide her flushed face against his overcoat, and weep out her misery. What she did do was to point to a chair, and say, “Won’t you take a seat?”

“It is very kind of you to come,” she went on, “but—” She broke off suddenly and looked away from him, and through the window at the snow-banks outside. “How early the winter has closed in,” she added, with nervous inconsequence.

Reuben did not even glance out at the snow. “I’m bound to say that it isn’t very clear to me what use I can be to you,” he said. “Of course, I’m all in the dark as to what you intend to do. Mr. Fairchild did not mention that you had any definite plans.”

“I had thought some of starting a milliner’s shop, of course very small, by myself. You know I have been working in one for some months at Tecumseh, ever since Mrs. Fairchild—ever since she—”

The girl did not finish the sentence, for Reuben nodded gravely, as if he understood, and that seemed to be all that was needed.

“That might do,” he said, after a moment’s thought, and speaking even more deliberately than usual. “I suppose I ought to tell you this doesn’t seem to me a specially wise thing, your coming back here. Don’t misunderstand me; I wouldn’t say anything to discourage you, for the world. And since you have come, it wasn’t of much use, perhaps, to say that. Still, I wanted to be frank with you, and I don’t understand why you did come. It doesn’t appear that the Fairchilds thought it was wise, either.”

“She did,” answered Jessica, quickly, “because she understood what I meant—what I had in mind to do when I got here. But I’m sure he laughed at it when she explained it to him; she didn’t say so, but I know he did. He is a man, and men don’t understand.”

Reuben smiled a little, but still compassionately. “Then perhaps I would better give it up in advance, without having it explained at all,” he said.

“No; when I saw your name on the sign, down on Main Street, this afternoon, I knew that you would see what I meant. I felt sure you would: you are different from the others. You were kind to me when I was a girl, when nobody else was. You know the miserable childhood I had, and how everybody was against me—all but you.”

Jessica had begun calmly enough, but she finished with something very like a sob, and, rising abruptly, went to the window.

Reuben sat still, thinking over his reply. The suggestion that he differed from the general run of men was not precisely new to his mind, but it had never been put to him in this form before, and he was at a loss to see its exact bearings. Perhaps, too, men are more nearly alike in the presence of a tearful young woman than under most other conditions. At all events, it took him a long time to resolve his answer—until, in fact, the silence had grown awkward.

“I’m glad you have a pleasant recollection of me,” he said at last. “I remember you very well, and I was very sorry when you left the school.” He had touched the painful subject rather bluntly, but she did not turn or stir from her post near the window, and he forced himself forward. “I was truly much grieved when I heard of it, and I wished that I could have talked with you, or could have known the circumstances in time, or—that is to say—that I could have helped you. Nothing in all my teacher experience pained me more. I—”

“Don’t let us talk of it,” she broke in. Then she turned and came close beside him, and lifted her hand as if to place it on his shoulder by a frank gesture of friendship. The hand paused in mid-air, and then sank to her side. “I know you were always as good as good could be. You don’t need to tell me that.”

“And I wasn’t telling you that, I hope,” he rejoined, speaking more freely now. “But you have never answered my question. What is it that Seth Fairchild failed to understand, yet which you are sure I will comprehend? Perhaps it is a part of your estimate of me that I should see without being told; but I don’t.”

“My reason for coming back? I hardly know how to explain it to you.”

Reuben made no comment upon this, and after a moment she went on:

“It sounds unlikely and self-conceited, but for months back I have been full of the idea. It was her talk that gave me the notion. I want to be a friend to other girls placed as I was when I went to your school, with miserable homes and miserable company, and hating the whole thing as I hated it, and aching to get away from it, no matter how; and I want to try and keep them from the pitch-hole I fell into. That’s what I want—only I can’t explain it to you as I could to her; and you think it’s silly, don’t you? And I—begin to think—so—myself.”

Reuben had risen now and stood beside her, and put his hand lightly on her shoulder as she finished with this doleful confession. He spoke with grave softness:

“No, not silly: it seems to me a very notable kind of wisdom. I had been thinking only of you, and that you could live more comfortably and happily elsewhere. But it seems that you were thinking of matters much greater than your own. And that surprises me, and pleases me, and makes me ashamed of my own view. Think you silly? My dear child, I think you are superb. Only”—he spoke more slowly, and in a less confident tone—“unfortunately, though it is wisdom to do the right thing, it doesn’t always follow that it is easy, or successful for that matter. You will need to be very strong, in order to stand up straight under the big task you have undertaken—very strong and resolute indeed.”

The touch of his hand upon her shoulder had been more to Jessica than his words, the line of which, in truth, she had not clearly followed. And when he ended with his exhortation to robust bravery, she was conscious of feeling weaker than for months before. The woman’s nature that was in her softened under the gentle pressure of that strong hand, and all the nameless feminine yearnings for wardenship and shelter from life’s battle took voice and pleaded in her heart. Ah, yes! he spoke of her being strong, and the very sound of his voice unnerved her. She could not think; there was no answer to be made to his words, for she had scarcely heard them. No reply of any kind would come to her lips. In place of a mind, she seemed to have only a single sense—vast, overpowering, glorious—and that was of his hand upon her shoulder. And enwrapped, swallowed up in this sense, she stood silent.

Then lo! the hand was gone, and with a start her wits came back. The lawyer was buttoning his overcoat, and saying that he must be going.

She shook hands with him mechanically, in confused apprehension lest she should think of nothing more to say to him before he departed. She followed him to the hall, and opened the front door for him. On the threshold the words she wanted came to her.

“I will try to be strong,” she said, “and I thank you a thousand times for coming.”

“Now, you will let me help you; you will come to me freely, won’t you?” Reuben said as he lifted his hat.

“Good-by,” answered Jessica, slowly, as she closed the door.

CHAPTER VIII.—THANKSGIVING AT THE LAWTONS’.

The church-bells rang out next morning through a crisp and frosty air. A dazzling glare of reflected sunshine lay on the dry snow, but it gave no suggestion of warmth. The people who passed on their way to Thanksgiving services walked hurriedly, and looked as if their minds were concentrated on the hope that the sexton had lighted the fire in the church furnace the previous day. The milkman who stopped his sleigh just beyond the house of the Law-tons had to beat off a great rim of chalk-white ice with the dipper before he could open his can.

The younger members of the Lawton family were not dependent upon external evidences, however, for their knowledge that it was bitterly cold. It was nearly noon when they began to gather in the kitchen, and cluster about the decrepit old cooking-stove where burned the only fire in the house. A shivering and unkempt group they made, in the bright daylight, holding their red hands over the cracked stove-lids, and snarling sulkily at the weather and one another when they spoke at all.

Jessica had slept badly, and, rising early and dressing in self-defence against the cold, had found her father in the act of lighting the kitchen fire. An original impulse prompted her to kiss him when she bade him good-morning; and Ben, rising awkwardly from where he had been kneeling in front of the grate, looked both surprised and shamefacedly gratified. It seemed ages since one of his daughters had kissed him before.

“It’s a regular stinger of a morning, ain’t it?” he said, blowing his fingers. “The boards in the sidewalk jest riz up and went off under my feet like pistols last night, when I was coming home.” He added with an accent of uneasiness: “Suppose you didn’t hear me come in?”

He seemed pleased when she shook her head, and his face visibly lightened. He winked at her mysteriously, and going over to a recess in the wall, back of the woodbox, dragged out a lank and dishevelled turkey of a dingy gray color, not at all resembling the fowls that had been presented to him the previous day.

“Trouble with me was,” he said, reflectively, “I shot four turkeys. If I hadn’t been a bang-up shot, and had only killed one, why, I’d been all right. But no, I couldn’t help hitting ’em, and so I got four. Of course, I hadn’t any use for so many: so I got to raffling ’em off, and that’s where my darned luck come in.” He held the bird up, and turned it slowly around, regarding it with an amused chuckle. “You know this cuss ain’t one of them I shot, at all. You see, I got to raffling, and one time I stood to win nine turkeys and a lamp and a jag of firewood. But then the thing kind o’ turned, and went agin me, and darn me if I didn’t come out of the little end of the horn, with nothing but this here. Sh-h!—M’rye’s coming. Don’t say nothing to her. I told her I earnt it carrying in some coal.”

Mrs. Lawton entered the room as her husband was putting back the turkey. She offered no remarks beyond a scant “mornin’!” to Jessica, and directed a scowl toward Lawton, before which he promptly disappeared. She replied curtly in the negative when Jessica asked if there was anything she could do; but the novelty of the offer seemed to slowly impress her mind, for after a time she began to talk of her own accord. Ben had come home drunk the night before, she said; there wasn’t anything new in that, but it was decidedly new for him to bring something to eat with him. He said he’d been carrying in coal, which was her reason for believing he had been really shaving shingles or breaking up old barrels. He couldn’t tell the truth if he tried—it wasn’t in him not to lie. The worst of his getting drunk was he was so pesky good-natured the next day. Her father used always to have a headache under similar conditions, and make things peculiarly interesting for everybody round about, from her mother at the helm of the boat to the nigger-boy and the mule on the tow-path ahead. That was the way all other men behaved, too: that is, all who were good for anything. But Ben, he just grinned and did more chores than usual, and hung around generally, as if everybody was bound to like him because he had made a fool of himself.

This monologue of information and philosophy was not delivered consecutively, but came in disjointed and irrelevant instalments, spread over a considerable space of time. There was nothing in it all which suggested a reply, and Jessica did not even take the trouble to listen very attentively. Her own thoughts were a more than sufficient occupation.

The failure of the experiment upon which she had ventured was looming in unpleasant bulk before her. Every glance about her, every word which fell upon her ears, furnished an added reason why she was not going to be able to live on the lines she had laid out. Viewed even as a visit, the experience was hateful. Contemplated as a career, it was simply impossible. Rather than bear it, she would go back to Tecumseh or New York; and rather than do this, she would kill herself.

Too depressed to control her thoughts, much less to bend them definitely upon consideration of some possible middle course between suicide and existence in this house, Jessica sat silent at the back of the stove, and suffered. Her evening here with her sisters seemed to blend in retrospect with the sleepless night into one long, confused, intolerable nightmare. They had scarcely spoken to her, and she had not known what to say to them. For some reason they had chosen to stay indoors after supper—although this was plainly not their habit—and under Samantha’s lead had entered into a clumsy conspiracy to make her unhappy by meaning looks, and causeless giggles, and more or less ingenious remarks directed at her, but to one another. Lucinda had indeed seemed to shrink from full communion with this cabal, but she had shown no overt act of friendship, and the three younger girls had been openly hostile. Even after she had taken refuge in her cold room, at an abnormally early hour, her sense of their enmity and her isolation had been kept painfully acute by their loud talk in the hall, and in the chamber adjoining hers. Oh, no!—she was not even going to try to live with them, she said resolutely and with set teeth to herself.

They straggled into the kitchen now, and Lucinda was the only one of them who said “good-morning” to her. Jessica answered her greeting almost with effusion, but she would have had her tongue torn out rather than allow it to utter a solitary first word to the others. They stood about the stove for a time, and then sat down to the bare kitchen table upon which the maternal slattern had spread a kind of breakfast. Jessica took her place silently, and managed to eat a little of the bread, dipped in pork fat. The coffee, a strange, greasy, light-brown fluid without milk, she could not bring herself to touch. There was no butter.

After this odious meal was over Samantha brought down a cheap novel, and ensconced herself at the side of the stove, with her feet on a stick of wood in the oven. The twins, after some protest, entered lazily upon the task of plucking the turkey. Lucinda drew a chair to the window, and began some repairs on her bonnet. For sheer want of other employment, Jessica stood by the window for a time, looking down upon this crude millinery. Then she diffidently asked to be allowed to suggest some changes, and Lucinda yielded the chair to her; and her deft fingers speedily wrought such a transformation in the work that the owner made an exclamation of delight. At this the twins left their turkey to come over and look, and even Samantha at last quitted the stove and sauntered to the window with an exaggerated show of indifference. She looked on for a moment, and then returned with a supercilious sniff, which scared the twins also away. When the hat was finished, and Lucinda had tried it on with obvious satisfaction, Jessica asked her to go for a little walk, and the two went out together.

There was a certain physical relief in escaping from the close and evil-smelling kitchen into the keen, clear cold, but of mental comfort there was little. The sister had nothing beyond a few commonplaces to offer in the way of conversation, and Jessica was in no mood to create small-talk. She walked vigorously forward as far as the sidewalks were shovelled, indifferent to direction and to surroundings, and intent only upon the angry and distracting thoughts which tore one another in her mind. It was not until the drifts forced them to turn that she spoke.

“I always dread to get downright mad: it makes me sick,” she exclaimed, in defiant explanation to the dull Lucinda, who did not seem to have enjoyed her walk.

“If I was you, I wouldn’t mind ’em,” said the sister.

“You just keep a stiff upper lip and tend to your own knitting, and they’ll be coming around in no time to get you to fix their bonnets for ’em. I bet you Samanthy’ll have her brown plush hat to pieces, and be bringing it to you before Sunday.”

“She’ll have to bring it to me somewhere else, then. To-day’s my last day in that house, and don’t you forget it!”

Jessica spoke with such vehemence that Lucinda could only stare at her in surprise, and the town girl went excitedly on: “When I saw father yesterday, I was almost glad I’d come back; and you—well, you’ve been decent to me, too. But the rest—ah-h!—I’ve been swearing in my mind every second since they came into the kitchen this morning. I was all for tears yesterday. I started out crying at the dépôt, and I cried the best part of last night; but I’ve got all through. Do you mind? I’m through! If there’s got to be any more weeping, they’re the ones that’ll do it!”

She ground her teeth together as she spoke, as if to prevent a further outpouring of angry words. All at once she stopped, on some sudden impulse, and looked her half-sister in the face. It was a long, intent scrutiny, under which Lucinda flushed and fidgeted, but its result was to soften Jessica’s mood. She resumed the walk again, but with a less energetic step, and the hard, wrathful lines in her face had begun to melt.

“Probably there will be no need for any one else to weep,” she said, ashamed of her recent outburst. “God knows, I oughtn’t to want to make anybody unhappy!” Then after a moment’s silence she asked: “Do you work anywhere?”

“I’ve got a job at the Scotch-cap factory as long as it’s running.”

“How much can you earn there?”

“Three dollars a week is what I’m getting, but they’re liable to shut down any time now.”

Jessica pondered upon this information for a little. Then she put another question, with increased interest. “And do you like it at home, with the rest of them, there?”

“Like it? Yes, about as much as a cat likes hot soap. It’s worse now a hundred times than it was when you lit out. If there was any place to go to, I’d be off like a shot.”

“Well, then, here’s what I wanted to ask you. When I leave it, what’s the matter with your coming with me? I mean it. And I’ll look after you.” The girl’s revolt against her new and odious environment had insensibly carried her back into the free phraseology of her former life. As this was equally familiar to Lucinda’s factory-attuned ear, it could not have been the slang expression at which she halted. But she did stop, and in turn looked sharply into Jessica’s face. Her own cheeks, red with exposure to the biting air, flushed to a deeper tint. “You better ask Samantha, if that’s your game,” she said. “She’s more in your line. I ain’t on that lay myself.”

Before Jessica had fairly comprehended the purport of this remark, her sister had started briskly off by herself. The town girl stood bewildered for a moment, with a little inarticulate moan of pained astonishment trembling on her lips. Then she turned and ran after Lucinda.

“Wait a minute!” she panted out as she overtook her. “You didn’t understand me. I wouldn’t for a million dollars have you think that of me. Please wait, and let me tell you what I really meant. You’ll break my heart if you don’t!”

Thus adjured, Lucinda stopped, and consented to fall in with the other’s slower step. She let it be seen plainly enough that she was a hostile auditor, but still she listened. As Jessica, with a readier tongue than she had found in Reuben Tracy’s presence the day before, outlined her plan, the factory-girl heard her, first with incredulity, then with inter-est, and soon with enthusiasm.

“Go with you? You just bet I will!” was the form of her adhesion to the plan, when it had been presented to her.

The two young women extended their walk by tacit consent far beyond the original intention, and it was past the hour set for the dinner when they at last reluctantly entered the inhospitable-looking domicile. Its shabby aspect and the meanness of its poverty-stricken belongings had never seemed so apparent before to either of them, as they drew near to it, but it was even less inviting within.

They were warned that it would be so by their father, whom they encountered just outside the kitchen door, chopping up an old plank for firewood. Ben had put on a glaringly white paper collar, to mark his sense of the importance of the festival, and the effect seemed to heighten the gloom on his countenance.

“There’s the old Harry to pay in there,” he said, nodding his head toward the door. “Melissa’s come in from the farm to spend the day, because she heard you was here, Jess, and somehow she got the idee you’d bring a lot of dresses and fixings, and she wanted her share, and got mad because there wasn’t any; and Samantha she pitched into her about coming to eat up our dinner, and M’rye she took Melissa’s part, and so I kind o’ sashayed out. They don’t need this wood any more’n a frog needs a tail, but I’m going to whack ’er all up.”

The Thanksgiving dinner which shortly ensued had a solitary merit: it did not last very long. But hurried as it was, Jessica did not sit it out. The three sisters with whom she was not friendly had been quarrelling, it seemed, with Melissa, the heavy-browed and surly girl who worked out at the Fair-child farm, but all four combined in an instant against the new-comers. Lucinda had never shone in repartee, and, though she did not shrink from bearing a part in the conflict to which she suddenly found herself a party, what she was able to say only made matters worse. As for Jessica, she bit her lips in fierce restraint, and for a long time said nothing at all. Melissa had formally shaken hands with her, and had not spoken a word.

When the thin turkey was put upon the table, and Mrs. Lawton had with some difficulty mangled it into eight approximately equal portions, a period of silence fell on the party—silence broken only by sounds of the carnivora which are not expected at the banquets of the polite. Even this measly fowl, badly cooked and defiled by worse than tasteless dressing though it was, represented a treat in the Lawton household, and the resident members fell upon it with eager teeth. Melissa sniffed a trifle at her portion, to let it be seen that they were better fed out on the farm, but she ate vigorously none the less. It was only Jessica who could summon no appetite, and who sat silent and sick at heart, wearily striving at the pretence of eating in order not to attract attention. She was conscious of hostile glances being cast upon her from either side, but she kept her eyes as steadily as she could upon her plate or on her father, who sat opposite and who smiled at her encouragingly from time to time.

It was one of the ungracious twins who first attained the leisure in which to note Jessica’s failure to eat, and commented audibly upon the difficulty of catering to the palates of “fine ladies.” The phrase was instantly repeated with a sneering emphasis by Samantha, which was the signal for a burst of giggling, in which Melissa joined. Then Samantha, speaking very distinctly and with an ostentatious parade of significance, informed Melissa that young Horace Boyce had returned to Thessaly only the previous day, “on the very train which father went down to meet.” This treatment of Melissa as a vehicle for the introduction of disagreeable topics impressed the twins as a shrewd invention, and one of them promptly added:

“Yes, M’liss’, and who do you think called here yesterday? Reuben Tracy the lawyer. He was there in the parlor for half an hour—pretty cold he must have found it—but he wasn’t alone.”

“Oh, yes, we’re getting quite fashionable,” put in Samantha. “Father ought to set out a hitching-post and a carriage-block, so that we can receive our callers in style. I hope it will be a stone one, dad.”

“And so do I,” broke in Lucinda, angrily, “and then I’d like to see your head pounded on it, for all it was worth.”

“Well, if it was,” retorted Samantha, “it would make a noise. And that’s more than yours would.”

“You shut up!” shouted Ben Lawton, with the over-vehemence of a weak nature in excitement. “Hain’t you got no decency nor compassion in ye? Has she done any harm to you? Can’t you give her a chance—to—to live it down?”

While the echoes of this loud, indignant voice were still on the air, Jessica had pushed her chair back, risen, and walked straight to the door leading up-stairs. She looked at nobody as she passed, but held her pale face proudly erect, though her lips were quivering.

After she had opened the door, some words seemed to come to her, and she turned.

“Live it down!” she said, speaking more loudly than was her wont, to keep her faltering voice from breaking. “Live it down! Why, father, these people don’t want me to live at all!”

Then she closed the door and was seen no more that day.

CHAPTER IX.—THE PARTNERSHIP.

Either through the softening influence of the Thanksgiving festival upon litigious natures, or by reason of the relaxing reaction from over-feasting, it happened that no clients of any kind visited Reuben Tracy’s law office next day. He came down early enough to light his own fires in both the inner and outer rooms—an experience for which he had been prepared by long observation of the effect produced by holidays upon his clerk—and he sat for a couple of hours by the stove, with his feet on the table and a book in his lap, waiting for Horace Boyce to keep the appointment. The book was an old collection of Carlyle’s earlier essays, and Reuben liked it better, perhaps, than any other member of his library family. He had not read it through, and there was a good deal in it which he seemed likely never to read. But there were other portions, long since very familiar to his mind and eye, which it was his habit to go over again whenever he had nothing else to do. The rough, thought-compelling diction rested his brain, by some curious rule of paradox. In the front of the volume he had written, “Not new books, but good books,” an apothegm adapted from a preface of an old English play which had pleased him.

He was indolently ruminating on the wealth of epithet with which the portrait of Cagliostro is painted, when his expected visitor arrived. He laughed aloud at some whimsical conceit that this association of people suggested, and tossed the book aside as he rose.

“I’ve been killing time,” he said, still smiling, “by reading about the prize impostor of the eighteenth century. You know it?—The Diamond Necklace. I like to read it. For good, downright swindling and effrontery there’s nothing anywhere like that fellow.”

Horace glanced at the book as he shook hands and took off his overcoat. He said nothing, but made a mental note that Reuben had come to know about Carlyle after everybody else had ceased reading him.

The two young men sat down together, and their talk for the first hour or so was of business matters. Reuben made clear what his practice was like, its dimensions, its profits, and its claims upon his time. The railroad business had come to him through the influence of his old friend Congressman Ansdell, of Tecumseh, and was very important. The farmers in the vicinity, too, had brought him the bulk of their patronage in the matter of drawing deeds and mortgages—most frequently the latter, he was sorry to say—because he was a farmer’s son. This conveyancing work had grown to such proportions, and entailed such an amount of consultation, that he had been more and more crowded out from active court practice, which he was reluctant to abandon. This was his reason for thinking of a partner. Then the conversation drifted into discussion of Horace’s fitness for the place, and his proper share in the earnings of the firm. They went over for dinner to the Dearborn House, where Reuben lived, before this branch of the talk was concluded. Upon their return, over some cigars which Horace thought very bad, they made more headway, and arrived at an understanding satisfactory to both. Reuben printed the firm name of “Tracy & Boyce” on a blotter, to see how it would look, and Horace talked confidently of the new business which the long connection of his family with Thessaly would bring to them.

“You know, they’ve been here from the very beginning. My great-grandfather was county judge here as far back as 1796, almost the first one after the county was created. And his son, my great-uncle, was congressman one term, and assemblyman for years; and another brother was the president of the bank; and my grandfather was the rector of St. Matthew’s; and then my father being the best-known soldier Dearborn sent out during the war—what I mean is, all this ought to help a good deal. It’s something to have a name that is as much a part of the place as Thessaly itself. You see what I mean?”

Horace finished with an almost nervous query, for it had dawned upon him that his companion might not share this high opinion of the value of an old name and pedigree. Come to think of it, the Tracys were nobody in particular, and he glanced apprehensively at Reuben’s large, placid face for signs of pique. But there was none visible to the naked eye, and Horace lighted a fresh cigar, and put his feet up on the table beside those of his new partner.

“I daresay there’s something in that,” Reuben remarked after a time. “Of course there must be, and for that matter I guess a name goes for more in our profession than it does anywhere else. I suppose it’s natural for people to assume that jurisprudence runs in families, like snub-noses and drink.” As soon as he had uttered this last word, it occurred to him that possibly Horace might construe it with reference to his father, and he made haste to add:

“I never told you, I think, about my own career. I don’t talk about it often, for it makes a fellow sound like Mr. Bounderby in Hard Times—the chap who was always bragging about being a self-made man.”

“No; I’d like to hear about it,” said Horace. “The first I remember of you was at the seminary here.”

“Well, I was only fifteen years old then, and all the story I’ve got dates before that. I can just remember when we moved into this part of the world—coming from Orange County. My father had bought a small farm some fifteen miles from here, over near Tyre, and we moved onto it in the spring. I was about five. I had an older brother, Ezra, and two younger ones. There was a good deal of hard work to do, and father tried to do it all himself, and so by harvest time he was laid up; and the men who came and got in the crops on shares robbed us down to the ground. When winter came, father had to get up, whether he was well enough or not, and chop wood for the market, to make up for the loss on harvesting. One evening he didn’t come home, and the team was away all night, too, with mother never going to bed at all, and then before daybreak taking Ezra to carry a lantern, and starting through the drifts for our patch of woods. They found my father dead in the forest, crushed under a falling tree.

“I suppose it was a terrible winter. I only dimly remember it, or the summer that followed. When another winter was coming on, my mother grew frightened. Try the best she knew how, she was worse off every month than she had been the month before. To pay interest on the mortgage, she had to sell what produce we had managed to get in, keeping only a bare moiety for ourselves, and to give up the woodland altogether. Soon the roads would be blocked; there was not enough fodder for what stock we had, nor even food enough for us. We had no store of fuel, and no means of staving off starvation. Under stern compulsion, solely to secure a home for her boys, my mother married a well-to-do farmer in the neighborhood—a man much older than herself, and the owner of a hundred-acre farm and of the mortgages on our own little thirty acres.

“I suppose he meant to be a just man, but he was as hard as a steel bloom. He was a prodigious worker, and he made us all work, without rest or reward. When I was nine years old, narrow-chested and physically delicate, I had to get up before sunrise for the milking, and then work all day in the hay-field, making and cocking, and obliged to keep ahead of the wagon under pain of a flogging. Three years of this I had, and I recall them as you might a frightful nightmare. I had some stray schooling—my mother insisted upon that—but it wasn’t much; and I remember that the weekly paper was stopped after that because Ezra and I wasted too much time in reading it.

“Finally my health gave out. My mother feared that I would die, and at last gained the point of my being allowed to go to Tyre to school, if I could earn my board and clothes there. I went through the long village street there, stopping at every house to ask if they wanted a little boy to do chores for his board and go to school. I said nothing about clothes after the first few inquiries. It took me almost all day to find a place. It was nearly the last house in the village. The people happened to want a boy, and agreed to take me. I had only to take care of two horses, milk four cows, saw wood for three stoves, and run errands. When I lay awake in my new bed that night, it was with joy that I had found such a kind family and such an easy place!

“I went to school for a year, and learned something—not much, I daresay, but something. Then I went back to the farm, alternating between that and other places in Tyre, some better, some worse, until finally I had saved eight dollars. Then I told my mother that I was going to Thessaly seminary. She laughed at me—they all laughed—but in the end I had my way. They fitted me out with some clothes—a vest of Ezra’s, an old hat, trousers cut perfectly straight and much too short, and clumsy boots two sizes too big for me, which had been bought by my stepfather in wrath at our continual trouble in the winter to get on our stiffened and shrunken boots.

“I walked the first ten miles with a light heart. Then I began to grow frightened. I had never been to Thessaly, and though I knew pretty well from others that I should be well received, and even helped to find work to maintain myself, the prospect of the new life, now so close at hand, unnerved me. I remember once sitting down by the roadside, wavering whether to go on or not. At last I stood on the brow of the hill, and saw Thessaly lying in the valley before me. If I were to live a thousand years, I couldn’t forget that sight—the great elms, the white buildings of the seminary, the air of peace and learning and plenty which it all wore. I tell you, tears came to my eyes as I looked, and more than once they’ve come again, when I’ve recalled the picture. I remember, too, that later on in the day old Dr. Burdick turned me loose in the library, as it were There were four thousand books there, and the sight of them took my breath away. I looked at them for a long time, I know, with my mouth wide open. It was clear to me that I should never be able to read them all—nobody, I thought, could do that—but at last I picked out a set of the encyclopaedia at the end of the shelf nearest the door, and decided to begin there, and at least read as far through the room as I could.”

Reuben stopped here, and relighted his cigar. “That’s my story,” he said after a pause, as if he had brought the recital up to date.

“I should call that only the preface—or rather, the prologue,” said Horace.

“No; the rest is nothing out of the ordinary. I managed to live through the four years here—peddling a little, then travelling for a photographer in Tecumseh who made enlarged copies of old pictures collected from the farm-houses, then teaching school. I studied law first by myself, then with Ansdell at Tecumseh, and then one year in New York at the Columbia Law School. I was admitted down there, and had a fair prospect of remaining there, but I couldn’t make myself like New York. It is too big; a fellow has no chance to be himself there. And so I came back here; and I haven’t done so badly, all things considered.”

“No, indeed; I should think not!” was Horace’s hearty comment.

“But I see the way now, I think,” continued Reuben, meditatively, “to doing much better still. I see a good many ways in which you can help me greatly.”

“I should hope so,” smiled young Mr. Boyce. “That’s what I’m coming in for.”

“I’m not thinking so much of the business,” answered Reuben; “there need be no borrowing-of trouble about that. But there are things outside that I want to do. I spoke a little about this the other day, I think.”

“You said something about going into politics,” replied Horace, not so heartily. The notion had already risen in his mind that the junior member of the new partnership might be best calculated to shine in the arena of the public service, if the firm was to go in for that sort of thing.

“Oh, no! not ‘politics’ in the sense you mean,” explained Reuben. “My ambition doesn’t extend beyond this village that we’re in. I’m not satisfied with it; there are a thousand things that we ought to be doing better than we are, and I’ve got a great longing to help improve them. That was what I referred to. That is what has been in my mind ever since my return. You spoke about politics just now. Strictly speaking, ‘politics’ ought to embrace in its meaning all the ways by which the general good is served, and nothing else. But, as a matter of fact, it has come to mean first of all the individual good, and quite often the sacrifice of everything else. This is natural enough, I suppose. Unless a man watches himself very closely, it is easy for him to grow to attach importance to the honor and the profit of the place he holds, and to forget its responsibilities. In that way you come to have a whole community regarding an office as a prize, as a place to be fought for, and not as a place to do more work in than the rest perform. This notion once established, why, politics comes naturally enough to mean—well, what it does mean. The politicians are not so much to blame. They merely reflect the ideas of the public. If they didn’t, they couldn’t stand up a minute by their own strength. You catch my idea?”

“Perfectly,” said Horace, politely dissembling a slight yawn.

“Well, then, the thing to do is to get at the public mind—to get the people into the right, way of regarding these things. It is no good effecting temporary reforms in certain limited directions by outbursts of popular feeling; for just as soon as the public indignation cools down, back come the abuses. And so they will do inevitably until the people get up to a calm, high level of intelligence about the management of such affairs as they have in common.”

“Quite so,” remarked Horace.

“Of course all this is trite commonplace,” continued Reuben. “You can read it in any newspaper any day. My point is in the application of it. It’s all well enough to say these things in a general way. Everybody knows they are true; nobody disputes them any more than the multiplication-table. But the exhortation does no good for that very reason. Each reader says: ‘Yes, it’s too bad that my neighbors don’t comprehend these things better;’ and there’s an end to the matter. Nothing is effected, because no particular person is addressed. Now, my notion is that the way to do is to take a single small community, and go at it systematically—a house-to-house canvass, so to speak—and labor to improve its intelligence, its good taste, its general public attitude toward its own public affairs. One can fairly count on at least some results, going at it in that way.”

“No doubt,” said the junior partner, smiling faintly.

“Well, then, I’ve got a scheme for a sort of society here—perhaps in the nature of a club—made up of men who have an interest in the town and who want to do good. I’ve spoken to two or three about it. Perhaps it is your coming—I daresay it is—but all at once I feel that it is time to start it. My notion is it ought to establish as a fundamental principle that it has nothing to do with anything outside Thessaly and the district roundabout. That is what we need in this country as much as anything else—the habit of minding our own immediate business. The newspapers have taught us to attend every day to what is going on in New York and Chicago and London and Paris, and every other place under the sun except our own. That is an evil. We have become like a gossiping woman who spends all her time in learning what her neighbors are doing, and lets the fire go out at home. Now, I like to think this can be altered a good deal, if we only set to work at it. You have been abroad; you have seen how other people do things, and have wider notions than the rest of us, no doubt, as to what should be done. What do you say? Does the idea attract you?”

Horace’s manner confessed to some surprise. “It’s a pretty large order,” he said at last, smilingly. “I’ve never regarded myself as specially cut out for a reformer. Still, there’s a good deal in what you say. I suppose it is practicable enough, when you come really to examine it.”

“At all events, we can try,” answered Reuben, with the glow of earnestness shining on his face. “John Fairchild is almost as fond of the notion as I am, and his paper will be of all sorts of use. Then, there’s Father Chance, the Catholic priest, a splendid fellow, and Dr. Lester, and the Rev. Mr. Turner, and a number of others more or less friendly to the scheme. I’m sure they will all feel the importance of having you in it. Your having lived in Europe makes such a difference. You can see things with a new eye.”

Horace gave a little laugh. “What my new eye has seen principally so far,” he said, with an amused smile running through his words, “is the prevalence of tobacco juice. But of course there are hundreds of things our provincial people could learn with profit from Europe. There, for example, is the hideous cooking done at all the small places. In England, for instance, it is a delight to travel in the country, simply because the food is so good in the little rural inns; our country hotel here is a horror. Then the roads are so bad here, when they might be made so good. The farmer works out his road tax by going out and ploughing up the highway, and you break your carriage-wheels in the task of smoothing it down again. Porters to carry one’s luggage at railway stations—that’s something we need, too. And the drinking of light beers and thin, wholesome wines instead of whiskey—that would do a great deal. Then men shouldn’t be allowed to build those ugly flat-topped wooden houses, with tin eaves-troughs. No people can grow up to be civilized who have these abominations thrust upon their sight daily. And—oh, I had forgotten!—there ought to be a penal law against those beastly sulphur matches with black heads. I lit one by accident the other night, and I haven’t got the smell of it out of my nostrils yet.”

Horace ended, as he had begun, with a cheerful chuckle; but his companion, who sat looking abstractedly at the snow line of the roofs opposite, did not smile.

“Those are the minor things—the graces of life,” he said, speaking slowly. “No doubt they have their place, their importance. But I am sick at heart over bigger matters—over the greed for money, the drunkenness, the indifference to real education, the neglect of health, the immodesty and commonness of our young folks’ thought and intercourse, the narrowness and mental squalor of the life people live all about me—”

“It is so everywhere, my dear fellow,” broke in Horace. “You are making us worse by comparison than we are.”

“But we ought to be so infinitely better by comparison! And we have it really in us to be better. Only nobody is concerned about the others; there is no one to check the drift, to organize public feeling for its own improvement. And that”—Reuben suddenly checked himself, and looked at his new partner with a smile of wonderful sweetness—“that is what I dream of trying to do. And you are going to help me!”

He rose as he spoke, and Horace, feeling his good impulses fired in a vague way by his companion’s earnestness and confidence, rose also, and stretched out his hand.

“Be sure I shall do all I can,” he said, warmly, as the two shook hands.

And when young Mr. Boyce went down the narrow stairway by himself, a few minutes later, having arranged that the partnership was to begin on the approaching 1st of December, he really fancied himself as a public-spirited reformer, whose life was to be consecrated to noble deeds. He was conscious of an added expansion of breast as he buttoned his fur coat across it, and he walked down the village street in a maze of proud and pleasant reflections upon his own admirable qualities.

CHAPTER X.—MR. SCHUYLER TENNEY.

Two or three weeks after the new sign of “Tracy & Boyce” had been hung upon the outer walls of Thessaly it happened that the senior partner was out of town for the day, and that during his absence the junior partner received an important visit from Mr. Schuyler Tenney. Although this gentleman was not a client, his talk with Horace was so long and interesting that the young lawyer felt justified in denying himself to several callers who were clients.

Mr. Schuyler Tenney, who has a considerable part to play in this story, did not upon first observations reveal any special title to prominence. To the cursory glance, he looked like any other of ten hundred hundreds of young Americans who are engaged in making more money than they need. I speak of him as young because, though there was a thick sprinkling of gray in his closely cut hair, and his age in years must have been above rather than below forty, there was nothing in his face or dress or bearing to indicate that he felt himself to be a day older than his companion. He was a slender man, with a thin, serious face, cold gray eyes, and a trim drab mustache. Under his creaseless overcoat he wore neat gray clothes, of uniform pattern and strictly commercial aspect. He spoke with a quiet abruptness of speech as a rule, and both his rare smiles and his occasional simulations of vivacity were rather obviously artificial. Meeting Mr. Schuyler Tenney for even the first time, and looking him over, you would not, it is true, have been surprised to hear that he had just planted a dubious gold mine on the confiding English capitalists, or made a million dollars out of a three-jointed collar-button, or calmly cut out and carried off a railroad from under the very guns of the Stock Exchange. If his appearance did not suggest great exploits of this kind, it did not deny them once they were hinted by others. But the chance statement that he had privately helped somebody at his own cost without hope of reward would have given you a distinct shock.

At the present moment, Mr. Tenney was publicly known as one of the smartest and most “go-ahead” young business men of Thessaly. Dim rumors were upon the air that he was really something more than this; but as the commercial agencies had long ago given him their feeble “A 1” of superlative rating, and nothing definite was known about his outside investments, these reports only added vaguely to his respectability. He was the visible and actual head of the large wholesale hardware house of “S. Tenney & Co.”

This establishment had before the war borne another name on the big sign over its portals, that of “Sylvanus Boyce.” A year or two after the war closed a new legend—“Boyce & Co.”—was painted in. Thus it remained until the panic of 1873, when it underwent a transformation into “Boyce & Tenney.” And now for some years the name of Boyce had disappeared altogether, and the portly, redfaced, dignified General had dwindled more and more into a position somewhere between the head book-keeper and the shipping-clerks. He was still a member of the firm, however, and it was apparently about this fact that Mr. Tenney had come to talk.

He took a seat beside Horace’s desk, after shaking hands coldly with the young man, and said without ceremony:

“I haven’t had a chance before to see you alone. It wouldn’t do to talk over at the store—your father’s in and out all the while, more out than in, by the way—and Tracy’s been here every day since you joined him.”

“He’s out of town to-day,” remarked Horace.

“So I heard. That’s why I came over. Do you know that your father has overdrawn his income account by nearly eleven thousand dollars, and that the wrong side of his book hasn’t got room for more than another year or so of that sort of thing? In fact, it wouldn’t last that long if I wanted to be sharp with him.”

The words were spoken very calmly, but they took the color as by a flash from Horace’s face. He swung his chair round, and, looking Tenney in the eyes, seemed spell-bound by what he saw there. The gaze was sustained between the two men until it grew to be like the experiment of two school-children who try to stare each other down, and under its strain the young lawyer felt himself putting forth more and more exertion to hold his own.

“I thought I would tell you,” added the hardware merchant, settling himself back in the chair and crossing his thin legs, and seemingly finding it no effort to continue looking his companion out of countenance. “Yes, I thought you ought to know. I suppose he hasn’t said anything to you about it.”

“Not a word,” answered Horace, shifting his glance to the desk before him, and striving with all his might to get his wits under control.

“That’s like him. The last thing he ever wants to talk about is business, least of all his own. They tell a story about a man who used to say, ‘Thank God, that’s settled!’ whenever he got a note renewed. He must have been a relation of the General’s.”

“It’s Sheridan that that’s ascribed to,” said Horace, for the sake of saying something.

“What, ‘Little Phil’? I thought he had more sense.”

There was something in this display of ignorance which gave Horace the courage to face his visitor once more. He turned resolutely toward Tenney.

“Nobody knows better than you do,” he said, finding increased self-control with every word, now that the first excitement was over, “that a great deal of money has been made in that firm of yours. I shall be glad to investigate the conditions under which the business has contrived to make you rich and your partner poor.”

Mr. Tenney seemed disagreeably surprised at this tone. “Don’t talk nonsense,” he said with passing asperity. “Of course you’re welcome. The books are open to you. If a man makes four thousand dollars and spends seven thousand dollars, what on earth has his partner’s affairs to do with it? I live within my income and attend to my business, and he doesn’t do either. That’s the long and short of it.”

The two men talked together on this subject for a considerable time, Horace alternating between expressions of indignation at the fact that his father had become the unedifying tail of a concern of which he once was everything, and more or less ingenious efforts to discover what way out of the difficulty, if any, was offered. Mr. Tenney remained unmoved under both, and at last coolly quitted the topic altogether.

“You ought to do well here,” he said, ignoring a point-blank question about how General Boyce’s remaining interest could be protected. “Thessaly’s going to have a regular boom before long. You’ll see this place a city in another year or two. We’ve got population enough now, for that matter, only it’s spread out so. How did you come to go in with Tracy?”

“Why shouldn’t I? He’s the best man here, and starting alone is the slowest kind of slow work.”

Mr. Tenney smiled a little, and put the tips of his fingers together gently.

“Tracy and I don’t hitch very well, you know,” he said. “I took a downright fancy to him when I first came in from Sidon Hill, but he’s such a curious, touchy sort of fellow. I asked him one day what church he’d recommend me to join; of course I was a stranger, and explained to him that what I wanted was not to make any mistake, but to get into the church where there were the most respectable people who would be of use to me; and what do you think he said? He was huffed about it—actually mad! He said he’d rather have given me a hundred dollars than had me ask him that question; and after that he was cool, and so was I, and we’ve never had much to say to each other since then. Of course, there’s no quarrel, you know. Only it strikes me he’ll be a queer sort of man to get along with. A lawyer with cranks like that—why, you never know what he’ll do next.”

“He’s one of the best fellows alive,” said Horace, with sharp emphasis.

“Why, of course he is,” replied Mr. Tenney. “But that isn’t business. Take the General, for instance; he’s a good fellow, too—in a different kind of way, of course—and see where it’s landed him. The best fellow is No. 1. Look out for him and you are all right. Tracy might be making five or six times as much as he is, if he went the right way to work. He does more business and gets less for it than any other lawyer in town. There’s no sense in that.”

“Upon my word, Mr. Tenney,” said Horace, after a moment’s pause, in which he deliberately framed what he was going to say, “I find it difficult to understand why you thought it worth while to come here at all to-day: it surely wasn’t to talk about Tracy; and the things I want to know about my father you won’t discuss. What do you want, anyway? Wait a moment, let me finish. What I see is this: that you were a private in the regiment my father was colonel of; that he made you a sort of adjutant, or something in the nature of a clerk, and so lifted you out of the ranks; that during the war, when your health failed, he gave you a place in his business here at home, which lifted you out of the farm; that a while later he made you a partner; and that gradually the tables have been completely turned, until you are the colonel and he is the private, you are rich and he is nearly insolvent. That is what the thing sums up to in my mind. What is your view of it? He was good to you. Have you come to tell me that now you are going to be good to him?”

“Good God! Haven’t I been good to him?” said Tenney, with real indignation. “Couldn’t I have frozen him out eighteen months ago instead of taking up his overdrafts at only ten per cent, charge so as to keep him along? There isn’t one man in a hundred who would have done for him what I have.”

“I am glad to hear it,” replied the young man.

“If the proportion was much larger, I am afraid this would be a very unhappy world to live in.”

Mr. Tenney eyed the lawyer doubtfully. He had not clearly grasped the meaning of this remark, but instinct told him that it was hostile.

“All right! You may take it that way, if you like.” He rose as he spoke and began buttoning his overcoat. “Only let me say this: when the smash comes, you can’t say I didn’t warn you. If you won’t listen to me, that’s your lookout.”

“But I haven’t done anything but listen to you for the last two hours,” said Horace, who longed to tell his visitor to go to the devil, and yet was betrayed into signs of anxiety at the prospect of his departure. “If you’ll remember, you haven’t told me anything that I asked for. Heaven knows, I should be only too glad to listen, if you’ve got anything to say.”

Mr. Tenney made a smiling movement with his thin lips and sat down again.

“I thought you would change your tune,” he said, calmly. Horace offered a gesture of dissent, to which the hardware merchant paid no attention. He had measured his man, and decided upon a system of treatment. “What I really wanted,” he continued, “was to look you over and hear you talk, and kind of walk around you and size you up, so to speak. You see I’ve only known you as a youngster—better at spending money than at making it. Now that you’ve started as a lawyer, I thought I’d take stock of you again, don’t you see; and the best way to sound you all around was to talk about your father’s affairs.”

Horace was conscious of a temptation to be angry at this cool statement, but he did not yield to it. “Then it isn’t true—what you have told me?” he asked.

“Well, yes, it is, mostly,” answered Mr. Tenney, again contemplating his joined finger-tips. “But it isn’t of so much importance compared with some other things. There’s bigger game afoot than partnerships in hardware stores.”

Horace gave a little laugh of mingled irritation and curiosity. “What the devil are you driving at, Tenney?” he said, and swung his chair once more to face his visitor.

This time the two men eyed each other more sympathetically, and the tones of the two voices lost something of their previous reserve. Mr. Tenney himself resumed the conversation with an air of direct candor:

“I heard somebody say you rather counted on getting some of the Minster iron-works business.”

“Well, the fact is, I may have said I hoped to, but nothing definite has been settled. The ladies are friends of mine: we came up from New York together last month; but nothing was decided.”

“I see,” said Mr. Tenney, and Horace felt uneasily, as he looked into those sharp gray eyes, that no doubt they did see very clearly. “You were just gassing. I thought as much. There’s no harm in that, only it’s no good to gas with me, for there’s some solid business to be done—something mighty promising for both of us.”

“Of course I’ve no notion what you mean,” said Horace. “But it’s just as well to clear up the ground as we go along. The first experiment of yoking up Boyces and Tenneys together hasn’t turned out so admirably as to warrant me—What shall I say?”

“As to warrant you going in with your eyes shut.” Mr. Tenney supplied the lacking phrase with evident enjoyment. “Not at all, Mr. Boyce. On the contrary, what I want of you is to have your eyes peeled particularly wide open. But, first of all, Tracy mustn’t hear a breath of this whole thing.”

“Then go no further, I beg of you. I sha’n’t touch it.”

“Oh, yes, you will,” said Mr. Tenney, briskly and with confidence. “He has his own private business. Why shouldn’t you? The railroad work, for example: you don’t share in that. That is his own, and quite right, too. But that very fact leaves you free, doesn’t it, to go into speculations on your own account?”

“Speculations—yes, perhaps.”

“No ‘perhaps’ about it; of course it does. At least, you can hear what I have to say without telling him, whether you go into the thing or not; do you promise me that?”

“I don’t think I wish to promise anything,” said Horace, doubtingly.

“All right! If you won’t deal, you won’t; and I must protect myself my own way.” Mr. Tenney did not rise and again begin buttoning his coat, nor was it, indeed, necessary. There had been menace enough in his tone to effect his purpose.

“Very well, then,” answered Horace, in a low voice; “if you insist, I promise.”

“I shall know within half an hour if you do tell him,” said Mr. Tenney, in his most affable manner; “but of course you won’t.”

“Of course I won’t!” snapped Horace, testily.

“All right, then. So far, so good. The first thing, then, is to put the affairs of the Minster women into your hands.”

Horace took his feet off the table, and looked in fixed surprise at his father’s partner. “How—what do you mean?” he stammered at last, realizing, even as he spoke, that there were certain strange depths in Mr. Tenney’s eyes which had been dimly apparent at the outset, and then had been for a long time veiled, and were now once more discernible. “How do you mean?”

“It can be fixed, as easy as rolling off a log. Old Clarke has gone to Florida for his health, and there’s going to be a change made. A word from me can turn the whole thing over to you.”

“A word from you!” Horace spoke with incredulity, but he did not really doubt. There was a revelation of reserve power in the man’s glance that fascinated him.

“That’s what I said. The question is whether I shall speak it or not.”

“To be frank with you”—Horace smiled a little—“I hope very much that you will.”

“I daresay. But have you got the nerve for it?—that’s the point. Can you keep your mouth shut, and your head clear, and will you follow me without kicking or blabbing? That’s what I want to know.”

“And that’s just what I can’t tell you. I’m not going to bind myself to do unknown things.” Horace said this bravely enough, but the shrewd, listening ear understood very well the lurking accent of assent.

“You needn’t bind yourself to anything, except to tell Tracy nothing till I give you the word, and then only what we shall agree upon. Of course, later on he will have to know something about it. But leave that to me. And mind, mum’s the word.” Mr. Tenney rose now, not tentatively, but as one who is really going. Horace sprang to his feet as well, and despite the other’s declaration that he was pressed for time, and had already stayed too long, insisted on detaining him.

“What I don’t understand in all this,” he said, hurriedly—“for that matter the whole thing is a mystery—but what I particularly fail to see is your object in benefiting me. The two things don’t hitch. You tell me that you have got my father in a hole, and then you offer me a great and substantial prize. I don’t catch the sequence. You are not the man to do things for nothing. What you haven’t told me is what there is in this affair for you.”

Mr. Tenney seemed complimented by this tribute to his commercial sense and single-mindedness. “No, I haven’t told you,” he said, buttoning his coat. “That’ll come in due time. All you’ve got to do meanwhile is to keep still, and to take the thing when it comes to you. Let me know at once, and say nothing to any living soul—least of all Tracy—until you’ve talked with me. That oughtn’t to be hard.”

“And suppose I don’t like the conditions?”

“Then you may lump them,” said Schuyler Ten, ney, disclosing his small teeth again in a half-smile, as he made his way out.

CHAPTER XI.—MRS. MINSTER’S NEW LEGAL ADVISER.

Some two weeks later Mr. Horace Boyce, on returning home one evening, found on his table a note which had been delivered during the day by a servant. It was from Mrs. Minster—“Desideria Minster” she signed herself—asking him to call upon her the following afternoon. The young man read the missive over and over again by the lamplight, and if it had been a love-letter from the daughter instead of the polite business appointment by the mother, his eyes couldn’t have flashed more eagerly as he took in the meaning of its words.

The meaning of its words! He thought long upon that, ruminating in his easy-chair before the fire until far past midnight, until the dainty little Japanese saucer at his side was heaped up with cigar ashes, and the air was heavy with smoke.

Evidently this summons was directly connected with the remarks made by Tenney a fortnight before. He had said the Minster business should come to him, and here it was. The fact that Mrs. Minster wrote to him at his residence, rather than at his office, was proof that she too wished to have him alone, and not the firm of Tracy & Boyce, as her adviser. That there should be this prejudice against Reuben, momentarily disturbed the young man; but, upon examination, he found it easy to account for it. Reuben was very nice—his partner even paused for a moment to reflect how decent a fellow Reuben really was—but then, he scarcely belonged to the class of society in which people like the Boyces and Minsters moved. Naturally the millionnaire widow, belonging as she did to an ancient family in the Hudson River valley, and bearing the queer name of a grandmother who had been a colonial beauty, would prefer to have as her family lawyer somebody who also had ancestors.

The invitation had its notable social side, too. There was no good in blinking the fact that his father the General—who had effected a somewhat noisy entrance to the house a half-hour ago, and the sound of whose burdened breathing now intermittently came to his ears in the silence of the night—had allowed the family status to lapse. The Boyces were not what they had been. In the course of such few calls as he had made since his return, it had been impossible for him not to detect the existence of a certain surprise that he should have called at all. Everybody, too, had taken pains to avoid reference to his father, even when the course of talk made such allusion natural. This had for the moment angered the young man, and later had not a little discouraged him. As a boy he had felt it a great thing to be the son of a general, and to find it now to be a distinct detriment was disheartening indeed. But this black-bordered, perfumed note from Mrs. Minster put all, as by the sweep of a hand, into the background. Once he visited that proud household as a friend, once he looked Thessaly in the face as the confidential adviser of the Minster family, the Boyces were rehabilitated.

To dwell upon the thought was very pleasant, for it led the way by sweetly vagrant paths to dreams of the dark-eyed, beautiful Kate. During the past month these visions had lost color and form under the disconcerting influences just spoken of, but now they became, as if by magic, all rosy-hued and definite again. He had planned to himself on that first November day a career which should be crowned by marriage with the lovely daughter of the millions, and had made a mental march around the walls encompassing her to spy out their least defended point. Now, all at once, marvellous as it seemed, he found himself transported within the battlements. He was to be her mother’s lawyer—nay, her lawyer as well, and to his sanguine fancy this meant everything.

Everything? The word seemed feeble. It meant one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen as his wife—a lady well-born, delicately nurtured, clever, and good; it meant vast wealth, untold wealth, with which to be not only the principal personage of these provincial parts, but a great figure in New York or Washington or Europe. He might be senator in Congress, minister to Paris, or even aspire to the towering, solitary eminence of the Presidency itself with the backing of these millions. It meant a yacht, the very dream of sea-going luxury and speed, in which to bask under Hawaiian skies, to loiter lazily along the topaz shores of far Cathay, to flit to and fro between spice lands and cold northern seas, the whole watery globe subject to her keel. Why, there could be a castle on the Moselle, a country house in Devonshire, a flat in Paris, a villa at Mentone, a summer island home on the St. Lawrence, a mansion in New York—all together, if he liked, or as many as pleased his whim. It might be worth the while to lease a shooting in Scotland, only the mischief was that badly bred Americans, the odious nouveaux riches, had rather discredited the national name in the Highlands.

So the young man’s fancies floated on the wreaths of scented smoke till at last he yawned in spite of himself, sated with the contemplation of the gifts the gods had brought him. He read Mrs. Minster’s note once again before he went to bed, and sleep overtook his brain while it was still pleasantly musing on the choicest methods of expending the income of her millions.

Curiously enough, during all these hours of happy castle-building, the question of why Schuyler Tenney had interested himself in the young man’s fortunes never once crossed that young man’s mind. To be frank, the pictures he painted were all of “gentlemen” and “ladies,” and his father’s partner, though his help might be of great assistance at the outset, could scarcely expect to mingle in such company, even in Horace’s tobacco reveries.

Neither to his father at the breakfast-table, nor to Reuben Tracy at the office, did young Mr. Boyce next day mention the fact that he was to call on Mrs. Minster. This enforced silence was not much to his liking, primarily because his temperament was the reverse of secretive. When he had done anything or thought of doing something, the impulse to tell about it was always strong upon him. The fact that the desire to talk was not rigorously balanced by regard for the exact and prosaic truth may not have been an essential part of the trait when we come to analysis, but garrulity and exaggeration ran together in Horace’s nature. To repress them now, just at the time when the most important event of his life impended, required a good deal of effort.

He had some qualms of conscience, too, so far as Reuben was concerned. Two or three things had happened within the past week which had laid him under special obligation to the courtesy and good feeling of his partner. They were not important, perhaps, but still the memory of them weighed upon his mind when, at three o’clock, he put on his coat and explained that he might not be back again that afternoon. Reuben nodded, and said, “All right: I shall be here. If so-and-so comes, I’ll go over the matter and make notes for you.” Then Horace longed very much to tell all about the Minster summons and the rest, and this longing arose as much from a wish to be frank and fair as from a craving to confide his secret to somebody; but he only hesitated for a second, and then went out.

Mrs. Minster received him in the chamber which had been her husband’s working room, and which still contained his desk, although it had since been furnished with book-shelves and was called the library. Horace noted, as the widow rose to greet him, that, though the desk was open, its pigeon-holes did not seem to contain many papers.

After his hostess had bidden him to be seated, and had spoken in mildly deprecating tones about the weather, she closed her resolutely lined lips, folded her hands in her lap, and looked at him in amiable suspense. As has been said before, Mrs. Minster’s dark face, with its high frame of white hair and its bright black eyes, habitually produced an impression of great cleverness and alert insight, and Horace was conscious of embarrassment in finding the task of conversation devolved upon himself. He took up the burden, however, and carried it along from subject to subject until at last it seemed fitting to broach the great topic.

“I didn’t get your note until evening,” he said, with a polite inquiring smile.

“No, I didn’t send it until after dinner,” she replied, and a pause ensued.

It fortunately occurred to Horace to say he was very glad to have her call upon him always, if in any way she saw how he could serve her. As he spoke these words, he felt that they were discreet and noncommittal, and yet must force her to come to the point. And they did, after a fashion.

“It is very kind of you, I’m sure,” she said, graciously, and came to a full stop.

“If there is anything I can do now,” Horace remarked tentatively.

“Well—oh yes! What I wanted to ask you was, do you know the Wendovers?”

“I don’t think I do.” murmured the young man, with a great sinking of the heart.

“They’re New York people,” the lady explained.

“I know almost nobody in New York,” answered Horace gloomily. “Wendover? No, I am quite sure the name is new to me.”

“That is curious,” said Mrs. Minster. She took a letter up from the desk. “This is from Judge Wendover, and it mentions you. I gathered from it that he knew you quite well.”

Oh, shades of the lies that might have been told, if one had only known!

Horace swiftly ransacked his brain for a way out of this dilemma. Evidently this letter bore upon his selection as her lawyer. He guessed rightly that it had been written at Tenney’s suggestion and by some one who had Mrs. Minster’s confidence. Obviously this some one was of the legal profession. That was his cue.

“The name does sound familiar, on second thought,” he said. “I daresay it is, if I could only place it. You see, I had a number of offers to enter legal firms in New York, and in that way I saw a good many people for a few minutes, you know, and quite probably I’ve forgotten some of their names. They would remember me, of course, but I might confuse them one with another, don’t you see? Strange, I don’t fix the man you mean. Was he a middle-aged man, grayish hair, well dressed?”

“Yes, that describes him.” She did not add that it would equally describe seven out of every ten other men called “judge” throughout the United States.

“Now I place him,” said Horace triumphantly. “There was some talk of my going into his office as a junior partner. Mutual friends of ours proposed it, I remember. But it didn’t attract me. Curious that I should have forgotten his name. One’s memory plays such whimsical tricks, though.”

“I didn’t know Judge Wendover was practising law,” said Mrs. Minster. “He never was much of a lawyer. He was county judge once down in Peekskill, about the time I was married, but he didn’t get reelected; and I thought he gave it all up when he went to New York.”

“If it’s the man I mean,” put in Horace, groping his way despairingly, “there wasn’t much business in his office. That is why I didn’t go in, I daresay: it wouldn’t be worth my while unless he himself was devoted to the law, and carried on a big practice.”

“I daresay it’s the same man,” remarked Mrs. Minster. “He probably would have a kind of law office. They generally do.”

“Well, may I ask,” Horace ventured after another pause, “in what connection he mentions my name?”

“He recommends me to consult you about affairs—to—well, how shall I say it?—to make you my lawyer?”

Eureka! The words were out, and the difficult passage about Judge What’s-his-name was left safely behind. Horace felt his brain swimming on a sea of exaltation, but he kept his face immobile, and bowed his head with gravity.

“I am very young for so serious a responsibility, I’m afraid,” he said modestly.

The widow reassured him with a smile. “There isn’t really much to do,” she answered. “And somebody would have to learn what there is; and you can do that as well as any one else, better than a stranger. The difficulty is,” she spoke more slowly, and Horace listened with all his ears: “you have a partner, I’m told.”

The young man did not hesitate for an instant. “Only in a limited way,” he replied. “Mr. Tracy and I have combined on certain lines of work where two heads are better than one, but we each keep distinct our own private practice. It is much better.”

“I certainly prefer it,” said Mrs. Minster. “I am glad to hear you keep separate. I do not know Mr. Tracy, and, indeed, he is very highly spoken of as a lawyer; but certain things I have heard—social matters, I mean—”

The lady broke off discreetly. She could not tell this young man what she had heard about that visit to the Lawton house. Horace listened to her without the remotest notion of her meaning, and so could only smile faintly and give the least suggestion of a sigh. Clearly he must throw Reuben overboard.

“We can’t have everything in this world just to our minds,” he said judicially, and it seemed to him to cover the case with prudent vagueness.

“I suppose you thought the partnership would be a good thing?” she asked.

“At the time—yes,” answered Horace. “And, to be fair, it really has some advantages. Mr. Tracy is a prodigious worker, for one thing, and he is very even-tempered and willing; so that the burden of details is taken off my shoulders to a great extent, and that disposes one to overlook a good many things, you know.”

Mrs. Minster nodded appreciation. She also knew what it was to delight in relief from the burden of details, and she said to herself that fortunately Mr. Boyce would thus have the more leisure to devote the affairs of the Minsters.

Into their further talk it is not needful to pursue the lady and her lawyer. She spoke only in general terms, outlining her interests and investments which required attention, and vaguely defining what she expected him to do. Horace listened very closely, but beyond a nebulous comprehension of the existence of a big company and a little company, which together controlled the iron-works and its appurtenances, he learned next to nothing. One of the first things which she desired of Horace was, however, that he should go to Florida and talk the whole subject over with Mr. Clarke, and to this he gladly assented.

“I will write to him that you are coming,” she said, as she rose. “I may tell you that he personally preferred Mr. Tracy as his successor; but, as I have told you—well, there were reasons why—”

Horace made haste to bow and say “quite so,” and thus spare Mrs. Minster the trouble of explanations. “Perhaps it will be better to say nothing to any one until I have returned from Florida,” he added, as a parting suggestion, and it had her assent.

The young man walked buoyantly down the gravel path and along the streets, his veins fairly tingling with excitement and joy. The great prize had come to him—wealth, honor, fame, were all within his grasp. He thought proudly, as he strode along, of what he would do after his marriage. Even the idea of hyphenating the two names in the English fashion, Minster-Boyce, came into his mind, and was made welcome. Perhaps, though, it couldn’t well be done until his father was dead; and that reminded him—he really must speak to the General about his loose behavior.

Thus Horace exultantly communed with his happy self, and formed resolutions, dreamed dreams, discussed radiant probabilities as he walked, until his abstracted eye was suddenly, insensibly arrested by the sight of a familiar sign across the street—“S. Tenney & Co.” Then for the first time he remembered his promise, and the air grew colder about him as he recalled it. He crossed the road after a moment’s hesitation, and entered the hardware store.

Mr. Tenney was alone in the little office partitioned off by wood and glass from the open store. He received the account given by Horace of his visit to the Minster mansion with no indication of surprise, and with no outward sign of satisfaction.

“So far, so good,” he said, briefly. Then, after a moment’s meditation, he looked up sharply in the face of the young man, who was still standing: “Did you say anything about your terms?”

“Of course not. How could I? You don’t show price-lists like a storekeeper, in the law!”

Mr. Tenney smiled just a little at Horace’s haughty tone—a smile of furtive amusement. “It’s just as well,” he said. “I’ll talk with you about that later. The old lady’s rather close-fisted. We may make a point there—by sending in bills much smaller than old Clarke’s used to be. I ought to have told you about that. Luckily it wasn’t needed.”

The matter-of-fact way in which Mr. Tenney used this “we” grated disagreeably on the young man’s ear, suggesting as it did a new partnership uncomfortably vague in form; but he deemed it wise not to touch upon the subject. His next question, as to the identity of Judge Wendover, brought upon the stage, however, still a third partner in the shadowy firm to which he had committed himself.

“Oh, Wendover’s in with us. He’s all right,” replied Schuyler Tenney, lightly. “Never heard of him, eh? He’s the president of the Thessaly Manufacturing Company. You’ll hear a good deal about that later on.” The speaker showed his teeth again by a smiling movement of the lips at this assurance, and Horace somehow felt his uneasiness growing.

“She wants me to go to Florida to see Clarke, and talk things over,” he said.

“Just so. That’s important. We must consider all that very carefully before you go. Clarke requires handling. Leave that to me. I’ll think out what you are to tell him.”

Horace was momentarily shrinking in importance before his own mental vision; and, though he resented it, he could not but submit. “I suppose I’d better make some other excuse to Tracy about the Florida trip,” he said, almost deferentially; “what do you think?”

“Oh, you think so, do you?” Mr. Tenney was interested, and made a renewed scrutiny of the young man’s face. “Perhaps. I’ll think about it, and let you know to-morrow. Look in about this time, and don’t say anything till then. So long!”

Thus dismissed, Horace took his leave, and it was not until he had nearly reached his home that the thoughts chasing each other in his mind began to take on once more roseate hues and hopeful outlines.

Mr. Tenney watched his partner’s son through the partition until he was out of sight, and then smiled at the papers on his desk in confidence. “He’s ready to lie at a minute’s notice,” he mused; “offered on his own hook to lie to Tracy. That’s all right—only he mustn’t try it on with me!”

CHAPTER XII.—THE THESSALY CITIZENS’ CLUB.

The village of Thessaly took no pains to conceal the fact that it was very proud of itself. What is perhaps more unique is that the farming people round about, and even the smaller and rival hamlets scattered through the section, cordially recognized Thessaly’s right to be proud, and had a certain satisfaction in themselves sharing that pride.

Lest this should breed misconception and paint a more halcyon picture of these minor communities than is deserved, let it be explained that they were not without their vehement jealousies and bickerings among one another. Often there arose between them sore contentions over questions of tax equalization and over political neglects and intrigues; and here, too, there existed, in generous measure, those queer parochial prejudices—based upon no question whatever, and defying alike inquiry and explanation—which are so curious a heritage from the childhood days of the race. No long-toed brachycephalous cave-dweller of the stone age could have disliked the stranger who hibernated in the holes on the other side of the river more heartily than the people of Octavius disliked those of Sidon. In the hop-picking season the young men of these two townships always fell to fighting when they met, and their pitched conflicts in and around the Half-way House near Tyre, when dances were given there in the winter, were things to talk about straight through until hoeing had begun in the spring. There were many other of these odd and inexplicable aversions—as, for instance, that which had for many years impelled every farmer along the whole length of the Nedahma Creek road to vote against any and all candidates nominated from Juno Mills, a place which they scarcely knew and had no earthly reason for disliking. But in such cases no one asked for reasons. Matters simply stood that way, and there was nothing more to be said.

But everybody was proud of Thessaly. Neighbors took almost as much pleasure in boasting of its wealth and activity, and prophesying its future greatness, as did its own sons. The farmers when they came in gazed with gratified amazement at the new warehouses, the new chimneys, the new factory walls that were rising everywhere about them, and returned more satisfied than ever that “Thessaly was just a-humming along.” Dearborn County had always heretofore been a strictly agricultural district, full of rich farm-lands and well-to-do farm-owners, and celebrated in the markets of New York for the excellence of its dairy products. Now it seemed certain that Thessaly would soon be a city, and it was already a subject for congratulation that the industries which were rooting, sprouting, or bearing fruit there had given Dearborn County a place among the dozen foremost manufacturing shires in the State.

The farmers were as pleased over this as any one else. It was true that they were growing poorer year by year; that their lands were gradually becoming covered with a parchment film of mortgages, more deadly than sorrel or the dreaded black-moss; that the prices of produce had gone down on the one hand as much as the cost of living and of labor had risen on the other; that a rich farmer had become a rarity in a district which once was controlled by the princes of herds and waving fields: but all the same the agriculturists of Dearborn County were proud of Thessaly, of its crowds of foreign-born operatives, its smoke-capped chimneys, and its noisy bustle. They marched almost solidly to the polls to vote for the laws which were supposed to protect its industries, and they consoled themselves for falling incomes and increased expenditure by roseate pictures of the great “home market” which Thessaly was to create for them when it became a city.

The village had once been very slow indeed. For many years it had been scarcely known to the outside world save as the seat of a seminary of something more than local repute. This institution still nestled under the brow of the hill whence the boy Reuben Tracy had looked with fondly wistful vision down upon it, but it was no longer of much importance. It was yet possible to discern in the quiet streets immediately adjoining the seminary enclosure, with their tall arched canopies of elm-boughs, and old-fashioned white houses with verandas and antique gardens, some remains of the academic character that this institution had formerly imparted to the whole village. But the centre of activity and of population had long since moved southward, and around this had grown up a new Thessaly, which needed neither elms nor gardens, which had use for its children at the loom or the lathe when the rudiments of the common school were finished, and which alike in its hours of toil and of leisure was anything rather than academie.

I suppose that in this modern Thessaly, with its factories and mills, its semi-foreign saloons, and its long streets of uniformly ugly cottage dwellings, there were many hundreds of adults who had no idea whether the once-famous Thessaly seminary was still open or not.

If Thessaly had had the time and inclination for a serious study of itself, this decadence of the object of its former pride might have awakened some regret. The seminary, which had been one of the first in the land to open its doors to both sexes, had borne an honorable part in the great agitation against slavery that preceded the war. Some of its professors had been distinguished abolitionists—of the kind who strove, suffered, and made sacrifices when the cause was still unpopular, yet somehow fell or were edged out of public view once the cause had triumphed and there were rewards to be distributed, and they had taken the sentiment of the village with them in those old days. Then there was a steady demand upon the seminary library, which was open to householders of the village, for good books. Then there was maintained each winter a lecture course, which was able, not so much by money as by the weight and character of its habitual patrons, to enrich its annual lists with such names as Emerson, Burritt, Phillips, Curtis, and Beecher. At this time had occurred the most sensational episode in the history of the village—when the rumor spread that a runaway negro was secreted somewhere about the seminary buildings, and a pro-slavery crowd came over from Tyre to have him out and to vindicate upon the persons of his protectors the outraged majesty of the Fugitive Slave law, and the citizens of Thessaly rose and chased back the invaders with celerity and emphasis.

But all this had happened so long ago that it was only vaguely remembered now. There were those who still liked to recall those days and to tell stories about them, but they had only themselves for listeners. The new Thessaly was not precisely intolerant of the history of this ante-bellum period, but it had fresher and more important matters to think of; and its customary comment upon these legends of the slow, one-horse past was, “Things have changed a good deal since then,” offered with a smile of distinct satisfaction.

Yes, things had changed. Stephen Minster’s enterprise in opening up the iron fields out at Juno, and in building the big smelting-works on the outskirts of Thessaly, had altered everything. The branch road to the coal district which he called into existence lifted the village at once into prominence as a manufacturing site. Other factories were erected for the making of buttons, shoes, Scotch-caps, pasteboard boxes, matches, and a number of varieties of cotton cloths. When this last industry appeared in the midst of them, the people of Thessaly found their heads fairly turned. To be lords of iron and cotton both!

This period of industrial progress, of which I speak with, I hope, becoming respect and pride, had now lasted some dozen years, and, so far from showing signs of interruption, there were under discussion four or five new projects for additional trades to be started in the village, which would be decided upon by the time the snow was off the ground. During these years, Thessaly had more than quadrupled its population, which was now supposed to approximate thirteen thousand, and might be even more. There had been considerable talk for the past year or two about getting a charter as a city from the legislature, and undoubtedly this would soon be done. About this step there were, however, certain difficulties, more clearly felt than expressed. Not even those who were most exultant over Thessaly’s splendid advance in wealth and activity were blind to sundry facts written on the other side of the ledger.

Thessaly had now some two thousand voters, of whom perhaps two-fifths had been born in Europe. It had a saloon for every three hundred and fifty inhabitants, and there was an uneasy sense of connection between these two facts which gave rise to awkward thoughts. The village was fairly well managed by its trustees; the electorate insisted upon nothing save that they should grant licenses liberally, and, this apart, their government did not leave much to be desired. But how would it be when the municipal honors were taken on, when mayor, aider-men and all the other officers of the new city, with enlarged powers of expenditure and legislation, should be voted for? Whenever the responsible business men of Thessaly allowed their minds to dwell upon a forecast of what this board of aldermen would probably be like, they frankly owned to themselves that the prospect was not inviting. But as a rule they did not say so, and the village was drifting citywards on a flowing tide.

It was just before Christmas that Reuben Tracy took the first step toward realizing his dream of making this Thessaly a better place than it was. Fourteen citizens, all more or less intimate friends of his, assembled at his office one evening, and devoted some hours to listening to and discussing his plans.

An embarrassment arose almost at the outset through the discovery that five or six of the men present thought Thessaly was getting on very well as it was, and had assumed that the meeting was called for the purpose of arranging a citizens’ movement to run the coming spring elections for trustees in the interest of good government—by which they of course understood that they were to be asked to take office. The exposure of this mistake threatened for a little time to wreck the purpose of the gathering. Mr. Jones, a gentleman who made matches, or rather had just taken a handsome sum from the great Ruby Loco-foco Trust as his reward for ceasing to manufacture them, was especially disposed to resent what Reuben said about the moral and material state of the village. He insisted that it was the busiest and most progressive town in that whole section of the State; it had six streets well paved, was lighted with gas, had no disorderly houses to speak of, and turned out an annual production of manufactures worth two and a half times as much as the industrial output of any other place of its size in the State. He had the figures at his tongue’s end, and when he finished with a spirited sentence about being proud of his native town, and about birds fouling their own nests, it looked as if he had the sense of the little assemblage with him.

Reuben Tracy found it somewhat difficult to reply to an unexpected attack of this nature. He was forced to admit the truth of everything his critic had said, and then to attempt once more to show why these things were not enough. Father Chance, the Catholic priest, a broad-shouldered, athletic young man, who preached very commonplace sermons but did an enormous amount of pastoral work, took up the speaking, and showed that his mind ran mainly upon the importance of promoting total abstinence. John Fairchild, the editor and owner of Thessaly’s solitary daily paper, a candid and warmhearted man, whose heterodoxy on the tariff question gave concern to the business men of the place, but whose journal was honest and popular, next explained what his views were, and succeeded in precipitating, by some chance remark, a long, rambling, and irrelevant debate on the merits of protection and the proper relations between capital and labor. To illustrate his position on these subjects, and on the general question of Thessaly’s condition, Mr. Burdick, the cashier of the Dearborn County Bank, next related how he was originally opposed to the Bland Silver bill, and detailed the mental processes by which his opinion had finally become reversed. The Rev. Dr. Turner, the rector of St. Matthew’s, a mildly paternal gentleman, who seemed chiefly occupied by the thought that he was in the same room with a Catholic priest, tentatively suggested a bazaar, with ladies and the wives of workingmen mingled together on the committee, and smiled and coughed confusedly when this idea was received in absolute silence.

It was Dr. Lester, a young physician who had moved into the village only a few years before, but was already its leading medical authority, who broke this silence by saying, with a glance which, slowly circling the room, finally rested on Reuben Tracy: “All this does not help us. Our views on all sorts of matters are interesting, no doubt, but they are not vital just now. The question is not so much why you propose something, but what do you propose?”

The answer came before the person addressed had arranged his words, and it came from Horace Boyce. This young gentleman had, with a self-restraint which he himself was most surprised at, taken no part in the previous conversation.

“I think this is the idea,” he said now, pulling his chair forward into the edge of the open space under the light, and speaking with easy distinctness and fluency. “It will be time enough to determine just what we will do when we have put ourselves in the position to act together upon what we may decide to do. We are all proud and fond of our village; we are at one in our desire to serve and advance its interests. That is a platform broad enough, and yet specific enough, for us to start upon. Let us accept it as a beginning, and form an association, club, society—whatever it may be called—with this primary purpose in view: to get together in one body the gentlemen who represent what is most enlightened, most public-spirited, and at once most progressive and most conservative in Thessaly. All that we need at first is the skeleton of an organization, the most important feature of which would be the committee on membership. Much depends upon getting the right kind of men interested in the matter. Let the objects and work of this organization unfold and develop naturally and by degrees. It may take the form of a mechanics’ institute, a library, a gymnasium, a system of coffee-taverns, a lecture course With elevating popular exhibitions; and so I might go on, enumerating all the admirable things which similar bodies have inaugurated in other villages, both here and in Europe. I have made these matters, both at home and abroad, a subject of considerable observation; I am enthusiastic over the idea of setting some such machinery in motion here, and I am perfectly confident, once it is started, that the leading men of Thessaly will know how to make it produce results second to none in the whole worldwide field of philanthropic endeavor.”

When young Mr. Boyce had finished, there was a moment’s hush. Then Reuben Tracy began to say that this expressed what he had in mind; but, before he had the words out, the match manufacturer exclaimed:

“Whatever kind of organization we have, it will need a president, and I move that Mr. Horace Boyce be elected to that place.”

Two or three people in the shadows behind clapped their hands. Horace protested that it was premature, irregular, that he was too young, etc.; but the match-maker was persistent, and on a vote there was no opposition. The Rev. Dr. Turner ceased smiling for a moment or two while this was going on, and twirled his thumbs nervously; but nobody paid any attention to him, and soon his face lightened again as his name was placed just before that of Father Chance on the general committee.

Once started, the work of organization went forward briskly. It was decided at first to call the organization the “Thessaly Reform Club,” but two manufacturers suggested that this was only one remove from styling it a Cobden Club outright, and so the name was altered to “Thessaly Citizens’ Club,” and all professed themselves pleased. When the question of a treasurer came up, Reuben Tracy’s name was mentioned, but some one asked if it would look just the thing to have the two principal officers in one firm, and so the match-maker consented to take the office instead. Even the committee on by-laws would have been made up without Reuben had not Horace interfered; then, upon John Fairchild’s motion, he was made the chairman of that committee, while Fairchild himself was appointed secretary.

When the meeting had broken up, and the men were putting on their overcoats and lighting fresh cigars, Dr. Lester took the opportunity of saying in an undertone to Reuben; “Well, what do you think of it?”

“It seems to have taken shape very nicely. Don’t you think so?”

“Hm-m! There’s a good deal of Boyce in it so far, and damned little Tracy!”

Reuben laughed. “Oh, don’t be disturbed about that. He’s the best man for the place. He’s studied all these things in Europe—the cooperative institutes in the English industrial towns, and so on; and he’ll put his whole soul into making this a success.”

The doctor sniffed audibly at this, but offered no further remark. Later on, however, when he was walking along in the crisp moonlight with John Fairchild, he unburdened his mind.

“It was positively sickening,” he growled, biting his cigar angrily, “to see the way that young cub of a Boyce foisted himself upon the concern. I’d bet any money he put up the whole thing with Jones. They nominated each other for president and treasurer—didn’t you notice that?”

“Yes, I noticed it,” replied Fairchild, with something between a sigh and a groan. After a moment he added: “Do you know, I’m afraid Rube will find himself in a hole with that young man, before he gets through with him. It may sound funny to you, but I’m deucedly nervous about it. I’d rather see a hundred Boyces broiled alive than have harm come to so much as Tracy’s little finger.”

“What could have ailed him to go in blindfold like that into the partnership? He knew absolutely nothing of the fellow.”

“I’ve told him a hundred times, he’s got no more notion of reading characters than a mulley cow. Anybody can go up to him and wheedle his coat off his back, if he knows the first rudiments of the confidence game. It seems, in this special instance, that he took a fancy to Boyce because he saw him give two turkeys to old Ben Lawton, who’d lost his money at a turkey-shoot and got no birds. He thought it was generous and noble and all that. So far as I can make out, that was his only reason.”

Dr. Lester stopped short and looked at his companion. Then he burst out in a loud, shrill laugh, which renewed itself in intermittent gurgles of merriment so many times that Fairchild finally found them monotonous, and interposed a question:

“There’s something besides fun in all this, Lester. What is it?”

“It isn’t professional to tell, my dear fellow, but there is something—you’re right—and we are Reuben’s friends against all the world; and this is what I laughed at.”

Then in a low tone, as if even the white flaring moon and the jewelled stars in the cold sky had ears, he told his secret to his friend—a secret involving one small human being of whose very existence Mr. Horace Boyce had no knowledge.

“The girl has come back here to Thessaly, you know,” concluded the doctor.

Fairchild nodded assent. Then after a moment’s thought he said:

“It’s too bad we changed the name of the organization. That cuss ought to be the president of a Reform Club!”

CHAPTER XIII.—=THE DAUGHTER OF THE MILLIONS.

A YOUNG woman who is in her twenty-third year, who is possessed of bright wits, perfect health, great personal beauty, and a fortune of nearly a million of dollars in her own right, and who moreover is untroubled by a disquieting preference for any single individual in the whole army of males, ought not, by all the rules, to be unhappy.

Kate Minster defied the rules, and moped. Not infrequently she found herself in the mood to think, “Now I realize how rich girls must feel when they commit themselves to entering a convent.” Oftener still, perhaps, she caught her tongue framing impatient or even petulant answers to her mother, to her mother’s friends, to everybody, in truth, save her sister Ethel. The conviction that she was bad-tempered had begun to enter her mind as it were without rapping, and with the air of a familiar. By dint of repeated searchings in the mirror, she had almost discovered a shadow between her brows which would presently develop into a wrinkle, and notify to the whole world her innate vixenish tendencies. And indeed, with all this brooding which grew upon her, it was something of a triumph for youth that the wrinkle had still failed to come.

It is said that even queens yawn sometimes, when nobody is looking. But at least they have work to do, such as it is, and grow tired. Miss Kate had no work of any sort, and was utterly wearied. The vacuity of existence oppressed her with formless fatigue, like a nightmare.

The mischief was that all of his own tremendous energy which Stephen Minster had transmitted to the generation following him was concentrated in this eldest child of his. The son had been a lightheaded weakling. The other daughter, Ethel, was as fragile and tenderly delicate as a Christmas rose. But Kate had always been the strong one of the family, physically vigorous, restive under unintelligent discipline, rebellious to teachers she disliked, and proudly confident of her position, her ability, and the value of her plans and actions. She had loved her father passionately, and never ceased to mourn that, favorite of his though she was, business cares had robbed her of so much of his company for years before his death. As a girl she had dreamed her dreams—bold, sweepingly ambitious visions they were; but this father of whom she was so proud, this powerful father who had so manfully subdued things under his feet, was always the one who was to encompass their fulfilment. When he died, her aêrial castles at a stroke tumbled into chaos. All her plans and aspirations had turned upon him as their pivot. Without him all was disorganized, shapeless, incomprehensible.

Nearly three years had gone by, and still matters about her and possibilities before her alike refused to take on definite outlines. She still did not do today the things she wanted to do, yet felt as powerless as ever to tell what her purposes for to-morrow clearly were. All the conditions for achievement were hers to command, and there was nothing to achieve.

There was something alike grotesque and pathetic in the record of her attempts to find work. She had gathered at considerable expense all the books and data she could learn about relating to the life and surroundings of Lady Arabella Stuart, and had started to write what should be the authoritative work on the subject, only to discover that she did not know how to make a book, and would not want to make that kind of a book if she had known how. She had begun collections of orchids, of coins, of engraved portraits, of cameos, and, at varying times, of kindred other trifles, and then on some gray and rainy morning had found herself impelled to turn upon each of these in its order with disgust and wrath. For music she unluckily had no talent, and a very exhaustive and costly outfit of materials for a painter’s studio amused her for less than one short month. She had a considerable feeling for color, but was too impatient to work laboriously at the effort to learn to draw; and so she hated her pictures while they were being painted, and laughed scornfully at them afterward. She wrote three or four short stories, full of the passions she had read about, and was chagrined to get them back from a whole group of polite but implacable editors. Embroidery she detested, and gardening makes one’s back ache.

Miss Minster was perfectly aware that other young ladies, similarly situated, got on very well indeed, without ever fluttering so much as a feather for a flight toward the ether beyond their own personal atmosphere; but she did not clearly comprehend what it was that they did like. She had seen something of their daily life—perhaps more of their amusements than of their occupations—and it was not wholly intelligible to her. They seemed able to extract entertainment from a host of things which were to her almost uninteresting. During her few visits to New York, Newport, and Saratoga, for the most part made during her father’s lifetime, people had been extremely kind to her, and had done their best to make her feel that there existed for her, ready made, a very notable social position. She had been invited to more dinners than there were days at her disposal in which to eat them; she had been called with something like public acclamation the belle of sundry theatre parties; her appearance and her clothes had been canvassed with distinctly overfree flattery in one or two newspapers; she had danced a little, made a number of calls, suffered more than was usual from headaches, and yawned a great deal. The women whom she met all seemed to take it for granted that she was in the seventh heaven of enjoyment; and the young men with huge expanses of shirt front, who sprang up everywhere in indefinite profusion about her, like the clumps of white double-hollyhocks in her garden at home, were evidently altogether sincere in their desire to please her. But the women all received the next comer with precisely the smile they gave her; and the young men, aside from their eagerness to devise and provide diversions for her, and the obvious honesty of their liking for her, were deadly commonplace. She was always glad when it was time to return to Thessaly.

Yet in this same village she was practically secluded from the society of her own generation. There were not a few excellent families in Thessaly who were on calling and even dining terms with the Minsters, but there had never been many children in these purely native households, and now most of the grown-up sons had gone to seek fortune in the great cities, and most of the girls had married either men who lived elsewhere or men who did not quite come within the Minsters’ social pale.

It was a wearisome and vexatious thing, she said to herself very often, this barrier of the millions beyond which she must not even let her fancy float, and which encompassed her solitude like a prison wall. Often, too, she approached the point of meditating revolt, but only to realize with a fresh sigh that the thought was hopeless. What could she do? If the people of her own class, even with the advantages of amiable manners, cleanliness, sophisticated speech, and refined surroundings, failed to interest her, it was certain enough that the others would be even less tolerable. And she for whose own protection these impalpable defences against unpleasant people, adventurers, fortune-hunters, and the like, had all been reared, surely she ought to be the last in the world to wish them levelled. And then she would see, of course, that she did not wish this; yet, all the same, it was very, very dull!

There must be whole troops of good folk somewhere whom she could know with pleasure and gain—nice women who would like her for herself, and clever men who would think it worth their while to be genuine with her, and would compliment her intelligence by revealing to it those high thoughts, phrased in glowing language, of which the master sex at its best is reputed to be capable—if only they would come in her way. But there were no signs betokening their advent, and she did not know where to look for them, and could not have sallied forth in the quest if she had known; and oh, but this was a weary world, and riches were mere useless rubbish, and life was a mistake!

Patient, soft-eyed Ethel was the one to whom such of these repinings against existence as found their way into speech were customarily addressed. She was sympathetic enough, but hers was a temperament placid as it was tender, and Kate could do everything else save strike out sparks from it when her mood was for a conflagration. As for the mother, she knew in a general way that Kate had a complaining and unsatisfied disposition, and had always had it, and accepted the fact much as she did that of Ethel’s poor health—as something which could not be helped, and therefore need not be worried about. Hence, she was but rarely made the confidante of her elder daughter’s feelings, but Kate occasionally railed at destiny in the hearing of Miss Tabitha Wilcox, whom she liked sometimes much more than at others, but always enough to have a certain satisfaction in mildly bullying her.

“You know as well as I do, Tabitha,” said Miss Kate one afternoon in January, rising from the couch where she had been lounging in sheer idleness, and walking over to the window with slow indolence of gait, “that our whole life here is simply ridiculous. We girls have lived here in Thessaly ever since we were little children, and if we left the place for good to-morrow, positively there would not be a single personal tie to be broken. So far as making friends go, we might as well have lived in the moon, where I believe it is settled that there are no people at all. And pray what is there in life worth having but friends—I mean real friends?”

“I had supposed,” began the little lady with the iron-gray curls, who sat primly beside the window at one corner of the great drawing-room—“I had supposed that I would be reckoned among—”

“Oh, don’t take me up in that way, Tabitha! Of course, I reckoned you—you know that well enough—that is, you count and you don’t count, for you are like one of us. Besides, I was thinking of people of my own age. There are some few nice girls here, but they are never frank with me as they are among themselves; I suppose because they are always thinking that I am rich. And how many young men do I know? Say ten, and I always think I can see dollar-marks shining in their eyes whenever I look at them. Certainly they have nothing else inside their heads that would shine.”

“I am sure you exaggerate their—”

“Oh, no, Tabitha! Don’t be sure of any such thing. They couldn’t be exaggerated; they wouldn’t bear it. Candidly now, can you think of a single man in the place whom you would like to hear mentioned as entertaining the shadow of a hope that some time he might be—what shall I say?—allowed to cherish the possibility of becoming the—the son-in-law of my mother?”

“I didn’t think your mind ran on such—”

“And it doesn’t,” broke in the girl, “not in the least, I assure you. I put it in that way merely to show you what I mean. You can’t associate on terms of equality with people who would almost be put out of the house if they ventured to dream of asking you to marry them. Both sides are at a disadvantage. Don’t you see what I mean? There is a wall between them. That is why I say we have no friends here; money brings us nothing that is of value; this isn’t like a home at all.”

“Why, and everybody is talking of how much Thessaly has improved of late years. And quite nice people coming in, too! They say the Bidwells, who already talk of building a second factory for their button business—they say they moved in very good society indeed at Troy. I’ve met Mrs. Bid-well twice at church sociables—the stout lady, you know, with the false front. They seem quite a knowable family.”

Kate did not reply, but drummed on the window-pane and watched the fierce quarrels of some English sparrows flitting about on the frozen snow outside. Miss Tabitha went on with more animation than sequence:

“Of course you’ve heard of the club they’re going to start, or have started; they call it the Thessaly Citizens’ Club.”

“Who? the Bidwells?”

“Oh, dear, no! The young men of the village—or I suppose it will soon be a city now. They tell all sorts of stories about what this club is going to do; reform the whole town, if you believe them. I always understood a club was for men to drink and play cards and sit up to all hours in, but it seems this is to be different. At any rate, several clergymen, Dr. Turner among them, have joined it, and Horace Boyce was elected president.”

The sparrows had disappeared, but Kate made no answer, and musingly kept her eyes fastened on the snow where the disagreeable birds had been.

“Now, there’s a young man,” said Miss Tabitha, after a pause. Still no comment came from the window, and so the elder maiden drifted forward:

“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—”

“Yes, but what about that—that girl?”

Tabitha returned to her subject without impatience. All her life she had been accustomed to being pulled up and warned from rambling, and if her hearers neglected to do this the responsibility for the omission was their own.

“Well, you know the one-story-and-attic place, painted brown, and flat-roofed, just beyond where the Truemans live. It seems as if I had had more than forty tenants for that place. Everybody that can’t keep a store anywhere, and make a living, seems to hit upon that identical building to fail in. Old Ikey Peters was the last; he started a sort of fish store, along with peanuts and toys and root beer, and he came to me a month or two back and said it was no go; he couldn’t pay the rent any more, and he’d got a job as night watchman: so if he found another tenant, might he turn it over to him until the first of May, when his year would be up? and I said, ‘Yes, if it isn’t for a saloon.’ And next I heard he had rented the place to a woman who had come from Tecumseh to start a milliner’s shop. I went past there a few days afterward, and I saw Ben Lawton fooling around inside with a jack-plane, fixing up a table; but even then I hadn’t a suspicion in the world. It must have been a week later that I went by again, and there I saw the sign over the door, ‘J. Lawton—Millinery;’ and would you believe it, even then I didn’t dream of what was up! So in walks I, to say ‘how do you do,’ and lo and behold! there was Ben Lawton’s eldest girl running the place, and quite as much at home as I was. You could have knocked me over with a feather!”

“Quite appropriately, in a milliner’s shop, too,” said Kate, who had taken a chair opposite to Tabitha’s and seemed really interested in her narrative.

“Well, there she was, anyway.”

“And what happened next? Did you faint or run away, or what?”

“Oh, she was quite civil, I must say. She recognized me—she used to see me at my sister’s when she worked there—and asked me to sit down, and explained that she hadn’t got entirely settled yet. Yes, I must admit that she was polite enough.”

“How tiresome of her! Now, if she had thrown boiling water on you, or even made faces at you, it would have been something like. But to ask you to sit down! And did you sit down, Tabitha?”

“I don’t see how I could have done otherwise. And she really has a great deal of taste in her work. She saw in a minute what’s been the trouble with my bonnets—you know I always told you there was something—they were not high enough in front. Don’t you think yourself, now, that this is an improvement?”

Miss Wilcox lifted her chin, and turned her head slowly around for inspection; but, instead of the praise which was expected, there came a merry outburst of laughter.

“And you really bought a bonnet of her!” Kate laughed again at the thought, and then, with a sudden impulse, rose from her chair, glided swiftly to where Tabitha sat, and kissed her. “You softhearted, ridiculous, sweet old thing!” she said, beaming at her, and smoothing the old maid’s cheek in affectionate patronage.

Tabitha smiled with pleasure at this rare caress, and preened her head and thin shoulders with a bird-like motion. But then the serious side of her experience loomed once more before her, and the smile vanished as swiftly as it had come.

“She’s not living with her father, you know. She and one of her half-sisters have had the back rooms rigged up to live in, and there they are by themselves. I guess she saw by my face that I didn’t think much of that part of the business. Still, thank goodness, it’s only till the first of May!”

“Shall you turn them out then, Tabitha?” Kate spoke seriously now.

“The place has always been respectable, Kate, even if it is tumble-down. To be sure, I did hear certain stories about the family of the man who sold non-explosive oil there two years ago, and his wife frizzed her hair in a way that went against my grain, I must admit; but it would never do to have a scandal about one of my houses, not even that one!”

“I know nothing about these people, of course,” said Kate, slowly and thoughtfully; “but it seems to me, to speak candidly, Tabitha, that you are the only one who is making what you call a scandal. No—wait; let me finish. In some curious way the thought of this girl has kept itself in my head—perhaps it was because she came back here on the same train with me, or something else equally trivial. Perhaps she is as bad a character as you seem to think, but it may also be that she only wants a little help to be a good girl and to make an honest living for herself. To me, her starting a shop like that here in her native village seems to show that she wants to work.”

“Why, Kate, everybody knows her character. There’s no secret in the world about that.”

“But suppose I am right about her present wish. Suppose that she does truly want to rehabilitate herself. Would you like to have it on your conscience that you put so much as a straw in her way, let alone turned her out of the little home she has made for herself? I know you better than that, Tabitha: you couldn’t bring yourself to do it. But there is this other thing. You may do her a great deal of injury by talking about her, as, for example, you have been talking to me here to-day. I am going to ask you a favor, a real personal favor. I want you to promise me not to mention that girl’s name again to a living soul until—when shall I say?—until the first of May; and if anybody else mentions it, to say nothing at all. Now, will you promise that?”

“Of course, if you wish it, but I assure you there wasn’t the slightest doubt in the world.”

“That I don’t care about. Why should we women be so brutal to each other? You and I had good homes, good fathers, and never knew what it was to want for anything, or to fight single-handed against the world. How can we tell what might have crushed and overwhelmed us if we had been really down in the thick of the battle, instead of watching it from a private box up here? No: give the girl a chance, and remember your promise.”

“Come to think of it, she has been to church twice now, two Sundays running. And Mrs. Turner spoke to her in the vestibule, seeing that she was a stranger and neatly dressed, and didn’t dream who she was; and she told me she was never so mortified in her life as when she found out afterward. A clergyman’s wife has to be so particular, you know.”

“Yes,” Kate answered, absently. Her heart was full of bitter and sardonic things to say about Mrs. Turner and her conceptions of the duties of a pastor’s helpmeet, but she withheld them because they might grieve Tabitha, and then was amazed at herself for being so considerate, and then fell to wondering whether she, too, was bitten by this Pharisaical spirit, and so started as out of a dream when Tabitha rose and said she must go and see Mrs. Minster before she took her departure.

“Remember your promise,” Kate said, with a little smile and another caress. She had not been so affectionate before in a long, long time, and the old maid mused flightily on this unwonted softness as she found her way up-stairs.

The girl returned to the window and looked out once more upon the smooth white crust which, broken only by half-buried dwarf firs, stretched across the wide lawn. When at last she wearied of the prospect and her thoughts, and turned to join the family on the floor above, she confided these words aloud to the solitude of the big room:

“I almost wish I could start a milliner’s shop myself.”

The depreciatory reflection that she had never discovered in all these years what was wrong with Tabitha’s bonnets rose with comical suddenness in her mind, and she laughed as she opened the door.

CHAPTER XIV.—HORACE EMBARKS UPON THE ADVENTURE.

Young Mr. Boyce was spared the trouble of going to Florida, and relieved from the embarrassment of inventing lies to his partner about the trip, which was even more welcome. Only a few days after the interview with Mrs. Minster, news came of the unexpected death of Lawyer Clarke, caused by one of those sudden changes of temperature at sunset which have filled so many churchyards in that sunny clime. His executors were both resident in Thessaly, and at a word from Mrs. Minster they turned over to Horace the box containing the documents relating to her affairs. Only one of these executors, old ’Squire Gedney, expressed any comment upon Mrs. Minster’s selection, at least in Horace’s hearing.

This Gedney was a slovenly and mumbling old man, the leading characteristics of whose appearance were an unshaven jaw, a general shininess and disorder of apparel, and a great deal of tobacco-juice. It was still remembered that in his youth he had promised to be an important figure at the bar and in politics. His failure had been exceptionally obvious and complete, but for some occult reason Thessaly had a soft corner in its heart for him, even when his estate bordered upon the disreputable, and for many years had been in the habit of electing him to be one of its justices of the peace. The functions of this office he avowedly employed in the manner best calculated to insure the livelihood which his fellow-citizens expected him to get out of it. His principal judicial maxim was never to find a verdict against the party to a suit who was least liable to pay him his costs. If justice could be made to fit with this rule, so much the better for justice. But, in any event, the ’squire must look out primarily for his costs. He made no concealment of this theory and practice; and while some citizens who took matters seriously were indignant about it, the great majority merely laughed and said the old man had got to live somehow, and voted good-naturedly for him next time.

If Calvin Gedney owed much to the amiability and friendly feeling of his fellow-townsmen, he repaid the debt but poorly in kind. No bitterer or more caustic tongue than his wagged in all Dearborn County. When he was in a companiable mood, and stood around in the cigar store and talked for the delectation of the boys of an evening, the range and scope of his personal sneers and sarcasms would expand under the influence of applauding laughter, until no name, be it never so honored, was sacred from his attack, save always one—that of Minster. There was a popular understanding that Stephen Minster had once befriended Gedney, and that that accounted for the exception; but this was rendered difficult of credence by the fact that so many other men had befriended Gedney, and yet now served as targets for his most rancorous jeers. Whatever the reason may have been, however, the ’squire’s affection for the memory of Stephen Minster, and his almost defiant reverence for the family he had left behind, were known to all men, and regarded as creditable to him.

Perhaps this was in some way accountable for the fact that the ’squire remained year after year in old Mr. Clarke’s will as an executor, long after he had ceased to be regarded as a responsible person by the village at large, for Mr. Clarke also was devoted to the Minsters. At all events, he was so named in the will, in conjunction with a non-legal brother of the deceased, and it was in this capacity that he addressed some remarks to Mr. Horace Boyce when he handed over to him the Minster papers. The scene was a small and extremely dirty chamber off the justice’s court-room, furnished mainly by a squalid sofa-bed, a number of empty bottles on the bare floor, and a thick overhanging canopy of cobwebs.

“Here they are,” said the ’squire, expectorating indefinitely among the bottles, “and God help ’em! What it all means beats me.”

“I guess you needn’t worry, Cal,” answered Horace lightly, in the easily familiar tone which Thessaly always adopted toward its unrespected magistrate. “You’d better come out and have a drink; then you’ll see things brighter.”

“Damn your impudence, you young cub!” shouted the ’squire, flaming up into sudden and inexplicable wrath. “Who are you calling ‘Cal’? By the Eternal, when I was your age, I’d have as soon bitten off my tongue as dared call a man of my years by his Christian name! I can remember your great-grandfather, the judge, sir. I was admitted before he died; and I tell you, sir, that if it had been possible for me to venture upon such a piece of cheek with him, he’d have taken me over his knee, by Gawd! and walloped me before the whole assembled bar of Dearborn County!”

The old man had worked himself up into a feverish reminiscence of his early stump-speaking days, and he trembled and spluttered over his concluding words with unwonted excitement.

Horace felt disposed to laugh. People always did laugh at “Cal” Gedney, and laugh most when he grew strenuous.

“You’d better get the drink first,” he said, putting the box under his arm, “and then free your mind.”

“I’ll see you food for worms, first!” shouted the ’squire, still furiously. “You’ve got your papers, and I’ve got my opinion, and that’s all there is ’twixt you and me. There’s the door that the carpenters made, and I guess they were thinking of you when they made it.”

“Upon my word, you’re amusing this morning, ’squire,” said Horace, looking with aroused interest at the vehement justice. “What’s the matter with you? Don’t your clothes fit you? Come around to the house and I’ll rig you up in some new ones.”

The ’squire began with a torrent of explosive profanity, framed in gestures which almost threatened personal violence. All at once he stopped short, looked vacantly at the floor, and then sat down on his bed, burying his face in his hands. From the convulsive clinching of his fingers among the grizzled, unkempt locks of hair, and the heaving of his chest, Horace feared he was going to have a fit, and, advancing, put a hand on his shoulder.

The ’squire shook it off roughly, and raised his haggard, deeply-furrowed face. It was a strong-featured countenance still, and had once been handsome as well, but what it chiefly said to Horace now was that the old man couldn’t stand many more such nights of it as this last had evidently been.

“Come, ’squire, I didn’t want to annoy you. I’m sorry if I did.”

“You insulted me,” said the old man, with a dignity which quavered into pathos as he added: “I’ve got so low now, by Gawd, that even you can insult me!”

Horace smiled at the impracticability of all this. “What the deuce is it all about, anyway?” he asked. “What have you got against me? I’ve always been civil to you, haven’t I?”

“You’re no good,” was the justice’s concise explanation.

The young man laughed outright. “I daresay you’re right,” he said, pleasantly, as one humors a child. “Now will you come out and have a drink?”

“I’ve not been forty-four years at the bar for nothing—”

“I should think not! Whole generations of barkeepers can testify to that.”

“I can tell,” went on the old man, ignoring the jest, and rising from the bed as he spoke; “I can tell when a man’s got an honest face. I can tell when he means to play fair. And I wouldn’t trust you one inch farther, Mr. Horace Boyce, than I could throw a bull by the tail. I tell you that, sir, straight to your teeth.”

Horace, still with the box snugly under his arm, had sauntered out into the dark and silent courtroom. He turned now, half smiling, and said:

“Third and last call—do you want a drink?”

The old man’s answer was to slam the door in his face with a noise which rang in reverberating echoes through the desolate hall of justice. Horace, still smiling, went away.

The morning had lapsed into afternoon, and succeeding hours had brought the first ashen tints of dusk into the winter sky, before the young man completed his examination of the Minster papers. He had taken them to his own room in his father’s house, sending word to the office that he had a cold and would not come down that day; and it was behind a locked door that he had studied the documents which stood for millions. On a sheet of paper he made certain memoranda from time to time, and now that the search was ended, he lighted a fresh cigar, and neatly reduced these to a little tabular statement:

When Horace had finished this he felt justified in helping himself to some brandy and soda. It was the most interesting and important computation upon which he had ever engaged, and its noble proportions grew upon him momentarily as he pondered them and sipped his drink. More than two and a quarter millions lay before his eyes, within reach of his hand. Was it not almost as if they were his? And of course this did not represent everything. There was sundry village property that he knew about; there would be bank accounts, minor investments and so on, quite probably raising the total to nearly or quite two millions and a half. Oh, to think of it!

And he had only put things down at par values. The telegraph stock was quoted at a trifle less, just now, but if there had been any Minster Iron-works stock for sale, it would command a heavy premium. The scattering investments, too, which yielded an average of five per cent., must be worth a good deal more than their face. What he didn’t like about the thing was that big block of Thessaly Manufacturing Company stock. That seemed to be earning nothing at all; he could find no record of dividends, or, in truth, any information whatever about it. Where had he heard about that company before? The name was curiously familiar to his mind; he had been told something about it—by whom?

All at once it flashed upon him. That was the company of which the mysterious Judge Wendover was president. Tenney had talked about it; Tenney had told him that he would hear a good deal about it before long.

As these reflections rose in the young man’s mind, the figures which he had written down on the paper seemed to diminish in size and significance. It was a queer notion, but he couldn’t help feeling that the millions had somehow moved themselves farther back, out of his reach. The thought of these two men—of the gray-eyed, thin-lipped, abnormally smart Tenney, and of that shadowy New York financier who shared his secrets—made him nervous. They had a purpose, and he was more or less linked to it and to them, and Heaven only knew where he might be dragged in the dark. He finished his glass and resolved that he would no longer remain in the dark. To-morrow he would see Tenney and Mrs. Minster and Reuben, and have a clear understanding all around.

There came sharp and loud upon his door a peremptory knocking, and Horace with a swift movement slipped the paper on which he had made the figures into the box, and noiselessly closed the cover. Then he opened the door, and discovered before him a man whom for the instant, in the dim light of the hall, he did not recognize. The man advanced a step, and then Horace saw that it was—strangely changed and unlike himself—his father!

“I didn’t hear you come in,” said the young man, vaguely confused by the altered appearance of the General, and trying in some agitation of mind to define the change and to guess what it portended.

“They told me you were here,” said the father, moving lumpishly forward into the room, and sinking into a chair. “I’m glad of it. I want to talk to you.”

His voice had suddenly grown muffled, as if with age or utter weariness. His hands lay palm upward and inert on his fat knees, and he buried his chin in his collar helplessly. The gaze which he fastened opaquely upon the waste-paper basket, and the posture of his relaxed body, suggested to Horace a simple explanation. Evidently this was the way his delightful progenitor looked when he was drunk. It was not a nice sight.

“Wouldn’t it be better to go to bed now, and talk afterward?” said the young man, with asperity.

The General looked up at his son. He clearly understood the purport of the question, and gathered his brows at first in a half-scowl. Then the humor of the position appealed to him, and he smiled instead—a grim and terrifying smile which seemed to darken rather than illumine his purplish face.

“Did you think I was drunk, that you should say that?” he asked, with the ominous smile still on his lips. He added, more slowly, and with something of his old dignity: “No—I’m merely ruined!”

“It has come, has it?” The young man heard himself saying these words, but they sounded as if they had issued from other lips than his. He had schooled himself for a fortnight to realize that his father was actually insolvent, yet the shock seemed to find him all unprepared.

“Then you expected it? You knew about it?”

“Tenney told me last month that it must come, sooner or later.”

The General offered an invocation as to Mr. Tenney’s present existence and future state which, solemnly impressive though it was, may not be set down here.

“So I say, too, if you like,” answered Horace, beginning to pace the room. “But that will hardly help us just now. Tell me just what has happened.”

“Sit down, then: you make me nervous, tramping about like that. The villain simply asked me to step into the office for a minute, and then took out his note-book, cool as a cucumber. ‘I thought I’d call your attention to how things stand between us.’ he said, as if I’d been a country customer who was behindhand with his paper. Then the scoundrel calmly went on to say that my interest in the partnership was worth less than nothing; that I already owed him more than the interest would come to, if the business were sold out, and that he would like to know what I proposed to do about it. By Heaven! that’s what he said to me, and I sat there and listened to him.”

“What did you say?”

“I told him what I thought of him. He hasn’t heard so much straight, solid truth about himself before since he was weaned, I’ll bet!”

“But what good was that? He isn’t the sort who minds that kind of thing. What did you tell him you would do?”

“Break his infernal skull for him if he ever spoke to me again!”

Horace almost smiled, as he felt how much older he was than this red-faced, white-haired boy, who could fight and drink and tell funny stories, world without end, but was powerless to understand business even to the extent of protecting his interest in a hardware store. But the tendency to smile was painfully short-lived; the subject was too serious.

“Well, tell me, then, what you are going to do!”

“Good God!” broke forth the General, raising his head again. “What can I do! Crawl into a hole and die somewhere, I should think. I don’t see anything else. But before I do, mark me, I’ll have a few minutes alone with that scoundrel, in his office, in the street, wherever I can find him; and if I don’t fix him up so that his own mother won’t know him, then my name isn’t ‘Vane’ Boyce!”

“Tut-tut,” said the prudent lawyer of the family. “Men don’t die because they fail in the hardware business, and this isn’t Kentucky. We don’t thrash our enemies up here in the North. Do you want me to see Tenney?”

“I suppose so—if you can stomach a talk with the whelp. He said something, too, about talking it over with you, but I was too raving mad to listen. Have you had any dealings with him?”

“Nothing definite. We’ve discussed one or two little things—in the air—that is all.”

The General rose and helped himself to some neat brandy from his son’s liqueur-stand. “Well, if you do—you hear me—he’ll singe you clean as a whistle. By God, he won’t leave so much as a pin-feather on you!”

Horace smiled incredulously. “I rather think I can take care of Mr. Schuyler Tenney,” said he, with a confident front. “I’ll go down and see him now, if you like, and don’t you worry yourself about it. I daresay I can straighten it out all right. The best thing you can do is to say nothing at all about your affairs to anybody. It might complicate matters if he heard that you had been publicly proclaiming your intention of beating him into a jelly. I don’t know, but I can fancy that he might not altogether like that. And, above all things, don’t get down on your luck. I guess we can keep our heads above water, Tenney or no Tenney.”

The young man felt that it was distinctly decent of him to thus assume responsibility for the family, and did not look to see the General take it so much as a matter of course. But that distinguished soldier had quite regained his spirits, and smacked his lips over a second glass of brandy with smiling satisfaction, as if Tenney had already been turned out of the hardware store, neck and crop.

“All right! You go ahead, and let him have it from the shoulder. Give him one for me, while you’re about it,” he said, with his old robust voice and hearty manner all come back again. The elasticity of this stout man’s temperament was a source of perpetual wonderment to his slender son.

Yet Horace, too, had much the same singular capacity for shaking off trouble, and he saw matters in quite a hopeful light as he strode along down toward Main Street. Clearly Tenney had only meant to frighten the General.

He found his father’s partner in the little office boxed off the store, and had a long talk with him—a talk prolonged, in fact, until after business hours. When he reflected upon this conversation during his homeward journey, he could recall most distinctly that he had told Tenney everything about the Minsters which the search of the papers revealed. Somehow, the rest of the talk had not seemed to be very important. Tenney had laughed lightly when the question of the General came up, and said: “Oh, you needn’t bother about that. I only wanted him to know how things stood. He can go on as long as he likes; that is, of course, if you and I continue to work together.” And Horace had said that he was much obliged, and would be glad to work with Mr. Tenney—and really that had been the sum of the whole conversation.

Or yes, there had been one other thing. Tenney had said that it would be best now to tell Reuben Tracy that Mrs. Minster had turned over her affairs to him—temporarily, at least—but not to discuss them with him at all, and not to act as if he thought they were of special importance.

Horace felt that this could easily be done. Reuben was the least suspicious man in the world, and the matter might be so stated to him that he would never give it a second thought.

The General received over the supper-table the tidings that no evil was intended to him, much as his son had expected him to; that is, with perfectly restored equanimity. He even admitted that Tenney was within his rights to speak as he did, and that there should be no friction provoked by any word or act of his.

“I don’t like the man, you know,” he said, between mouthfuls, “but it’s just as well that I should stick by him. He’s skinned me dry, and my only chance is now to keep friendly with him, in the hope that when he begins skinning other people he’ll let me make myself good out of the proceeds.”

This worldly wisdom, emanating from such an unlikely source, surprised the young man, and he looked up with interest to his father’s face, red-shining under the lamplight.

“I mean what I say,” continued the General, who ate with unfailing gusto as he talked. “Tenney as much as said that to me himself, awhile ago.”

Horace nodded with comprehension. He had thought the aphorism too concise and strong for his father’s invention.

“And I could guess with my eyes shut how he’s going to do it,” the elder Boyce went on. “He’s got a lot of the stock of the Thessaly Manufacturing Company, the one that’s built the rolling mills in connection with the Minster iron-works, and the rest of the stock is held in New York; and some fine day the New Yorkers will wake up and find themselves cleaned out. Oh, I know Mr. Tenney’s little ways!”

The General wagged his round head upon its thick neck with complacency at his superior insight, but Horace finished his supper in silence. He did not see very far into the millstone yet, but already he guessed that the stockholders who were to be despoiled lived in Thessaly and not New York. A strange, amorphous vision of the looting of the millions arose like a mirage between him and the shaded lamplight, and he looked into its convolving vortex half in terror, half in trembling fascination.

Suddenly he felt himself impelled to say—why he could not tell—“I might as well speak to you about it. It is my ambition to marry Miss Kate Minster. I think I shall succeed.”

The General almost upset his chair in his eagerness to rise, lean over the table, and shake hands with his son.

CHAPTER XV.—THE LAWTON GIRL’S WORK.

FORTUNATELY Jessica Lawton’s humble little business enterprise began to bring in returns before her slender store of money was quite exhausted. Even more fortunate, at least in her estimation, was the fact that the lion’s share of this welcome patronage came from the poor working-girls of the village. When the venture was a month old, there was nearly enough work to occupy all her time, and, taking into account the season, this warranted her in believing that she had succeeded.

The result had not come without many anxious days, made bitter alike by despairing tremors for the future and burning indignation at the insults and injuries of the present. Now that these had in a measure abated, she felt, in looking back upon them, that the fear of failure was always the least of her troubles. At the worst, the stock which, through Mrs. Fairchild’s practical kindness, she had been able to bring from Tecumseh, could be sold for something like its cost. Her father’s help had sufficed for nearly all the changes needed in the small tenement, and she had money enough to pay the rent until May.

The taking over of Lucinda was a more serious matter, for the girl had been a wage-earner, and would be entitled to complain if it turned out that she had been decoyed away from the factory on an empty promise. But Lucinda, so far from complaining, seemed exceptionally contented. It was true that she gave no promise of ever acquiring skill as a milliner, and she was not infrequently restless under the discipline which Jessica, with perhaps exaggerated caution, strove to impose, but she worked with great diligence in their tiny kitchen, and served customers in the store with enthusiasm if not finesse. The task of drilling her into that habit of mind which considers finger-nails and is mindful of soap was distinctly onerous, and even now had reached only a stage in which progress might be reported; but much could be forgiven a girl who was so cheerful and who really tried so hard to do her share.

As for the disagreeable experiences, which had once or twice been literally terrifying, the girl still grew sick at heart with rage and shame and fear that they might jeopardize her plans, when she thought of them. In their ruder aspects they were divisible into two classes. A number of young men, sometimes in groups of twos or threes, but more often furtively and alone, had offensively sought to make themselves at home in the store, and had even pounded on the door in the evening after it was shut and bolted; a somewhat larger number of rough factory-girls, or idlers of the factory-girl class, had come from time to time with the obvious intention of insulting her. These latter always appeared in gangs, and supported one another in cruel giggling and in coarse inquiries and remarks.

After a few painfully futile attempts to meet and rebuff these hostile waves, Jessica gave up the effort, and arranged matters so that she could work in the living-room beyond, within call if she were needed, but out of the visual range of her persecutors. Lucinda encountered them instead, and gave homely but vigorous Rolands for their Olivers. It was in the interchange of these remarks that the chief danger, to the struggling little business lay, for if genuine customers heard them, why, there was an end to everything. It is not easy to portray the girl’s relief as week after week went by, and time brought not only no open scandal, but a marked diminution of annoyance. When Jessica was no longer visible, interest in the sport lagged. To come merely for the sake of baiting Lucinda was not worth the while. And when these unfriendly visits slackened, and then fell off almost altogether, Jessica hugged to her breast the notion that it was because these rough young people had softened toward and begun to understand and sympathize with her.

It was the easier to credit this kindly hypothesis in that she had already won the suffrages of a considerable circle of working-girls. To explain how this came about would be to analyze many curious and apparently contradictory phases of untutored human nature, and to recount many harmless little stratagems and well-meant devices, and many other frankly generous words and actions which came from hearts not the less warm because they beat amid the busy whir of the looms, or throbbed to the time of the seamstress’s needle.

Jessica’s own heart was uplifted with exultation, sometimes, when she thought upon the friendliness of these girls. So far as she knew and believed, every one of them was informed as to her past, and there was no reason beyond their own inclination why they should take stock in her intentions for the future. To a slender few, originally suggested by Lucinda, and then confirmed by her own careful scrutiny, she had confided the crude outlines of her scheme—that is, to build up a following among the toilers of her own sex, to ask from this following no more than a decent living for work done, and to make this work include not merely the details of millinery and hints about dress, but a general mental and material helpfulness, to take practical form step by step as the means came to hand and the girls themselves were ready for the development. Whenever she had tried to put this into words, its melancholy vagueness had been freshly apparent to her, but the girls had believed in her! That was the great thing.

And they had brought others, and spread the favorable report about, until even now, in the dead season, lying half way between Christmas and the beginning of Lent, she was kept quite busy. To be sure, her patrons were not governed much by these holiday dates at any time, and she was undoubtedly doing their work better and more cheaply than it could ever have been done for them before, but their good spirit in bringing it was none the less evident for that.

And out of the contact with this good spirit, Jessica began to be dimly conscious of getting great stores of strength for herself. If it could be all like this, she felt that her life would be ideally happy. She had not the skill of mind to separate her feelings, and contrast and weigh them one against the other, but she knew clearly enough that she was doing what afforded her keen enjoyment, and it began to be apparent that merely by doing it she would come to see more clearly, day by day, how to expand and ennoble her work. The mission which Annie Fairchild had urged upon her and labored to fit her for, and which she had embraced and embarked upon with only the vaguest ideas as to means or details or specific aims, was unfolding itself inspiringly before her.

During this period she wrote daily to the good woman who had sent her upon this work—short letters setting forth tersely the events and outcome of the day—and the answers which came twice a week helped greatly to strengthen her.

And do not doubt that often she stood in grave need of strength! The mere matter of regular employment itself was still more or less of a novelty to her; regular hours still found her physically rebellious. The restraints of a shop, of studied demeanor, of frugal meals, of no intimate society save that of one dull girl,—these still wore gratingly upon her nerves, and produced periodical spasms of depression and gloom, in which she was much tortured by doubts about herself and the utility of what she was doing.

Sometimes, too, these doubts took the positive form of temptation—of a wild kind of longing to get back again into the atmosphere where bright lights shone on beautiful dresses, and the hours went swiftly, gayly by with jest, and song, and the sparkle of the amber air-beads rising in the tall wine-glasses. There came always afterward the memory of those other hours which dragged most gruesomely, when the daylight made all tawdry and hateful once more, and heartaches ruled where smiles had been. Yet still these unbidden yearnings would come, and then the girl would set her teeth tight together, and thrust her needle through the mutinous tears till they were exorcised.

It had been in her unshaped original plan to do a good deal for her father, but this proved to be more easily contemplated than done. Once the little rooms had been made habitable for her and Lucinda, there remained next to nothing for him to do. He came around every morning, when some extraordinary event, such as a job of work or a fire, did not interfere, and offered his services, but he knew as well as they did that this was a mere amiable formality. He developed a great fondness for sitting by the stove in Jessica’s small working room, and either watching her industrious fingers or sleeping calmly in his chair. Perhaps the filial instinct was not strong in Lucinda’s composition; perhaps it had been satiated by over-close contact during those five years of Jessica’s absence. At any rate, the younger girl did not enjoy Ben’s presence as much as her sister seemed to, and almost daily detracted from his comfort by suggestions that the apartments were very small, and that a man hanging around all day took up a deplorable amount of room.

It had been Jessica’s notion, too, that she and her sister would walk out in the evenings under the escort of their father, and thus secure themselves from misapprehension. But Lucinda rebelled flatly against this, at least until Ben had some new clothes, and the money for these was not forthcoming. Jessica did find it possible to spare a dollar or so to her father weekly, and there had been a nebulous understanding that this was to be applied to raiment; but the only change in his appearance effected by this so far had been a sporadic accession of startlingly white paper collars.

There were other minor disappointments—portions of her plan, so to speak, which had failed to materialize—but the net result of a month’s trial was distinctly hopeful. Although most of such work as had come to her was from the factory-girls, not a few ladies had visited the little store, and made purchases or given orders. Among these she liked best of all the one who owned the house; a very friendly old person, with corkscrew curls and an endless tongue—Miss Tabitha Wilcox. She had already made two bonnets for her, and the elderly lady had been so pleasant and talkative that she had half resolved, when next she came in, to unfold to her the scheme which now lay nearest to her heart.

This was nothing less than securing permission to use a long-deserted and roomy building which stood in the yard, at the back of the one she occupied, as a sort of evening club for the working-girls of the town. Jessica had never been in this building, but so far as she could see through the stained and dismantled windows, where the drifts did not render approach impossible, it had formerly been a dwelling-house, and later had been used in part as a carpenter’s shop.

To get this, and to fit it up simply but comfortably as a place where the tired factory and sewing girls could come in the evening, to read or talk or play games if they liked, to merely sit still and rest if they chose, but in either case to be warm and contented and sheltered from the streets and the deadly boredom of squalid lodgings, became little by little her abiding ambition. She had spoken tentatively to some of the girls about it, and they were all profoundly enthusiastic over the plan.

It remained to enlist the more fortunate women whose assistance could alone make the plan feasible. Jessica had essayed to get at the parson’s wife, Mrs. Turner; but that lady, after having been extremely cordial, had unaccountably all at once turned icy cold, and cut the girl dead in the street. I said “unaccountably,” but Jessica was not at all at a loss to comprehend the change, and the bitterness of the revelation had thrown her into an unusually deep fit of depression. For a time it had seemed to her hopeless to try to find another confidante in that class which despised and shrank from her. Then Miss Tabitha’s pleasant words and transparent good-heartedness had lifted her out of her despondency, and she was almost resolved now to approach her on the subject of the house iii the back yard.

CHAPTER XVI.—A GRACIOUS FRIEND RAISED UP.

The opportunity which Jessica sought came with unlooked-for promptness—in fact, before she had quite resolved what to ask for, and how best to prefer her request.

It was a warm, sunny winter morning, with an atmosphere which suggested the languor of May rather than the eagerness of early spring, and which was already in these few matutinal hours playing havoc with the snowbanks. The effects of the thaw were unpleasantly visible on the sidewalks, where deep puddles were forming as the drifts melted away, and the back yard was one large expanse of treacherous slush. Jessica had hoped that her father would come, in order that he might cut away the ice and snow in front, and thus drain the walk for passers-by. But as the mild morning air rendered it unnecessary to seek the comfort of a seat by the stove, Ben preferred to lounge about on the outskirts of the hay-market, exchanging indolent jokes with kindred idlers, and vaguely enjoying the sunshine.

Samantha, however, chose this forenoon for her first visit to the milliner’s shop, and showed a disposition to make herself very much at home. The fact that encouragement was plainly wanting did not in any way abash her. Lucinda told her flatly that she had only come to see what she could pick up, and charged her to her face with having instigated her friends to offer them annoyance and affront. Samantha denied both imputations with fervor, the while she tried on before the mirror a bronze-velvet toque with sage-green feathers.

“I don’t know that I ever quite believed that of you, Samantha,” said Jessica, turning from her dismayed contemplation of the water on the sidewalk. “And if you really want to be friendly, why, you are welcome to come here. But I have heard of things you have said that were not at all nice.”

“All lies!” remarked Samantha, studying the effect of the hat as nearly in a profile view as she could manage with a single glass. “You can’t believe a word you hear here in Thessaly. Wouldn’t this go better if there was some yellow put in there, close by the feathers?”

“I didn’t want to believe it,” said Jessica. “I’ve never done you any harm, and never wished anything but well by you, and I couldn’t see why you should want to injure me.”

“Don’t I tell you they lied?” responded Samantha, affably. “‘Cindy, here, is always blackguarding me. You know you always did,” she added, in passing comment upon Lucinda’s indignant snort, “but I don’t bear no malice. It ain’t my nature to. I suppose a hat like this comes pretty high, don’t it?”

As she spoke, a sleigh was driven up with some difficulty through the yielding snowbanks, and stopped close to the sidewalk in front of the shop. It was by far the most distinguished-looking sleigh Jessica had seen in Thessaly. The driver on the front seat bore a cockade proudly in his high hat, and the horses he controlled were superbly matched creatures, with glossy silver-mounted harness, and with tails neatly braided and tied up in ribbons for protection from the slush. A costly silver-fox wrap depended over the back of the cutter, and a robe of some darker but equally sumptuous fur enfolded the two ladies who sat in the second seat.

Jessica was glad that so splendid an equipage should have drawn up at her door, with a new-born commercial instinct, even before she recognized either occupant of the sleigh.

“That’s Kate Minster,” said Samantha, still with the hat of her dreams on her head, “the handsomest girl in Thessaly, and the richest, and the stuck-up-edest. Cracky! but you’re in luck!”

Jessica did not know much about the Minsters, but she now saw that the other lady, who was already preparing to descend, and stood poised on the rail of the cutter looking timorously at the water on the walk, was no other than Miss Tabitha Wilcox.

She turned with quick decision to Samantha.

“I will give you that hat you’ve got on,” she said in a hurried tone, “if you’ll go with Lucinda clear back into the kitchen and shut both doors tight after you, and stay there till I call you.”

At this considerable sacrifice the store was cleared for the reception of these visitors—the most important who had as yet crossed its threshold.

Miss Tabitha did not offer to introduce her companion—whom Jessica noted furtively as a tall, stately, dark girl, with a wonderfully handsome face, who stood silently by the little showcase and was wrapped in furs worth the whole stock of millinery she confronted—but bustled about the store, while she plunged into the middle of an explanation about hats she had had, hats she thought of having, and hats she might have had, of which the milliner understood not a word. It was not, indeed, essential that she should, for presently Tabitha stopped short, looked about her triumphantly, and asked:

“Now, wasn’t I right? Aren’t they the nicest in town?”

The tall girl smiled, and inclined her dignified head.

“They are very pretty, indeed,” she answered, and Jessica remarked to herself what a soft, rich voice it was, that made even those commonplace words so delightful to the ear.

“I don’t know that we wanted to look at anything in particular,” rattled on Miss Tabitha. “We were driving by” (O Tabitha! as if Miss Kate had not commanded this excursion for no other purpose than this visit!) “and I just thought we’d drop in, for I’ve been telling Miss Minster about what excellent taste you had.”

A momentary pause ensued, and then Jessica, conscious of blushes and confusion, made bold to unburden her mind of its plan.

“I wanted to speak to you,” she said, falteringly at first, but with a resolution to have it all out, “about that vacant house in the back yard here. It looks as if it had been a carpenter’s shop last, and it seems in very bad repair.”

“I suppose it might as well come down,” broke in Miss Wilcox. “Still, I—”

“Oh, no! that wasn’t what I meant!” protested Jessica. “I—I wanted to propose something about it to you. If—if you will be seated, I can explain what I meant.”

The two ladies took chairs, but with a palpable accession of reserve on their countenances. The girl went on to explain:

“To begin with, the factory-girls and sewing-girls here spend too much time on the streets—I suppose it is so everywhere—the girls who were thrown out when the match factory shut down, particularly. What else can they do? There is no other place. Then they get into trouble, or at any rate they learn slangy talk and coarse ways. But you can’t blame them, for their homes, when they have any, are not pleasant places, and where they hire rooms it is almost worse still. Now, I’ve been thinking of something—or, rather, it isn’t my own idea, but I’ll speak about that later on. This is the idea: I have come to know a good many of the best of these girls—perhaps you would think they were the worst, too, but they’re not—and I know they would be glad of some good place where they could spend their evenings, especially in the winter, where it would be cosey and warm, and they could read or talk, or bring their own sewing for themselves, and amuse themselves as they liked. And I had thought that perhaps that old house could be fixed up so as to serve, and they could come through the shop here after tea, and so I could keep track of them, don’t you see?”

“I don’t quite think I do,” said Miss Tabitha, with distinct disapprobation. The other lady said nothing.

Jessica felt her heart sink. The plan had seemed so excellent to her, and yet it was to be frowned down.

“Perhaps I haven’t made it clear to you,” she ventured to say.

“Oh, yes, you have,” replied Miss Tabitha. “I don’t mind pulling the house down, but to make it a rendezvous for all the tag-rag and bob-tail in town—I simply couldn’t think of it! These houses along here have seen their best days, perhaps, but they’ve all been respectable, always!”

“I don’t think myself that you have quite grasped Miss Lawton’s meaning.”

It was the low, full, quiet voice of the beautiful fur-clad lady that spoke, and Jessica looked at her with tears of anxious gratitude in her eyes.

Miss Minster seemed to avoid returning the glance, but went on in the same even, musical tone:

“It appears to me that there might be a great deal of much-needed good done in just that way, Tabitha. The young lady says—I think I understood her to say—that she had talked with some of these girls, and that that is what they would like. It seems to me only common-sense, if you want to help people, to help them in their own way, and not insist, instead, that it shall be in your way—which really is no help at all!”

“Nobody can say, I hope, that I have ever declined to extend a helping hand to anybody who showed a proper spirit,” said Miss Wilcox, with dignity, putting up her chin.

“I know that, ma’am,” pleaded Jessica. “That is why I felt sure you would like my plan. I ought to tell you—it isn’t quite my plan. It was Mrs. Fairchild, at Tecumseh, who used to teach the Burfield school, who suggested it. She is a very, very good woman.”

“And I think it is a very, very good idea,” said Miss Kate, speaking for the first time directly to Jessica. “Of course, there would have to be safeguards.”

“You have no conception what a rough lot they are,” said Miss Tabitha, in more subdued protest. “There is no telling who they would bring here, or what they wouldn’t do.”

“Indeed, I am sure all that could be taken care of,” urged Jessica, taking fresh courage, and speaking now to both her visitors. “Only those whom I knew to mean well by the undertaking should be made members, and they would agree to very strict rules, I feel certain.”

“Why, child alive! where would you get the money for it, even if it could be done otherwise?” Miss Tabitha wagged her curls conclusively, but her smile was not unkind.

It would not be exact to say that Jessica had not considered this, but, as it was now presented, it seemed like a new proposition. She was not ready to answer it.

Miss Wilcox did not wait over long for a reply, but proceeded to point out, in a large and exhaustive way, the financial impossibilities of the plan. Jessica had neither heart nor words for an interruption, and Miss Kate listened in an absent-minded manner, her eyes on the plumes and velvets in the showcase.

The interruption did come in a curiously unexpected fashion. A loud stamping of wet feet was heard on the step outside; then the door from the street was opened. The vehemence of the call-bell’s clamor seemed to dismay the visitor, or perhaps it was the presence of the ladies. At all events, he took off his hat, as if it had been a parlor instead of a shop, and made an awkward inclusive bow, reaching one hand back for the latch, as if minded to beat a retreat.

“Why, Mr. Tracy!” exclaimed Tabitha, rising from her chair.

Reuben advanced now and shook hands with both her and Jessica. For an instant the silence threatened to be embarrassing, and it was not wholly relieved when Tabitha presented him to Miss Minster, and that young lady bowed formally without moving in her chair. But the lawyer could not suspect the disagreeable thoughts which were chasing one another behind these two unruffled and ladylike fronts, and it was evident enough that his coming was welcome to the mistress of the little shop.

“I have wanted to look in upon you before,” he said to Jessica, “and I am ashamed to think that I haven’t done so. I have been very much occupied with other matters. It doesn’t excuse me to myself, but it may to you.”

“Oh, certainly, Mr. Tracy,” Jessica answered, and then realized how miserably inadequate the words were. “It’s very kind of you to come at all,” she added.

Tabitha shot a swift glance at her companion, and the two ladies rose, as by some automatic mechanical device, absolutely together.

“We must be going, Miss Lawton,” said the old maid, primly.

A woman’s intuition told Jessica that something had gone wrong. If she did not entirely guess the nature of the trouble, it became clear enough on the instant to her that these ladies misinterpreted Reuben’s visit. Perhaps they did not like him—or perhaps—She stepped toward them and spoke eagerly, before she had followed out this second hypothesis in her mind.

“If you have a moment’s time to spare,” she pleaded, “I wish you would let me explain to Mr. Tracy the plan I have talked over with you. He was my school-teacher; he is my oldest friend—the only friend I had when I was—a—a girl, and I haven’t seen him before since the day I arrived home here. I should so much like to have you hear his opinion. The lady I spoke of—Mrs. Fairchild—wrote to him about me. Perhaps he knows of the plan already from her.”

Reuben did not know of the plan, and the two ladies consented to take seats again while it should be explained to him. Tabitha assumed a distant and uneasy expression of countenance, and looked straight ahead of her out through the glass door until the necessity for relief by conversation swelled up within her to bursting point; for Kate had rather flippantly deserted her, and so far from listening with haughty reserve under protest, had actually joined in the talk, and taken up the thread of Jessica’s stumbling explanation.

The three young people seemed to get on extremely well together. Reuben fired up with enthusiasm at the first mention of the plan, and showed so plainly the sincerity of his liking for it that Miss Minster felt herself, too, all aglow with zeal. Thus taken up by friendly hands, the project grew apace, and took on form and shape like Aladdin’s palace.

Tabitha listened with a swiftly mounting impatience of her speechless condition, and a great sickening of the task of watching the cockade of the coachman outside, which she had imposed upon herself, as the talk went on. She heard Reuben say that he would gladly raise a subscription for the work; she heard Kate ask to be allowed to head the list with whatever sum he thought best, and then to close the list with whatever additional sum was needed to make good the total amount required; she heard Jessica, overcome with delight, stammer out thanks for this unlooked-for adoption and endowment of her poor little plan, and then she could stand it no longer.

“Have you quite settled what you will do with my house?” she asked, still keeping her face toward the door. “There are some other places along here belonging to me—that is, they always have up to now—but of course if you have plans about them, too, just tell me, and—”

“Don’t be absurd, Tabitha,” said Miss Minster, rising from her chair as she spoke. “Of course we took your assent for granted from the start. I believe, candidly, that you are more enthusiastic about it this moment than even we are.”

Reuben thought that the old lady dissembled her enthusiasm skilfully, but at least she offered no dissent. A few words more were exchanged, the lawyer promising again his aid, and Miss Minster insisting that she herself wanted the task of drawing up, in all its details, the working plan for the new institution, and, on second thoughts, would prefer to pay for it all herself.

“I have been simply famishing for something to do all these years,” she said, in smiling confidence, to Tracy, “and here it is at last. You can’t guess how happy I shall be in mapping out the whole thing—rules and amusements and the arrangements of the rooms and the furnishing, and—everything.”

Perhaps Jessicas face expressed too plainly the thought that this bantling of hers, which had been so munificently adopted, bade fair to be taken away from her altogether, for Miss Minster added: “Of course, when the sketch is fairly well completed, I will show it to you, and we will advise together,” and Jessica smiled again.

When the two ladies were seated again in the sleigh, and the horses had pranced their way through the wet snow up to the beaten track once more, Miss Tabitha said:

“I never knew a girl to run on so in all my born days. Here you are, seeing these two people for the very first time half an hour ago, and you’ve tied yourself up to goodness only knows what. One would think you’d known them all your life, the way you said ditto to every random thing that popped into their heads. And a pretty penny they’ll make it cost you, too! And what will your mother say?” Miss Minster smiled good-naturedly, and patted her companion’s gloved hand with her own. “Never you worry, Tabitha,” she said, softly. “Don’t talk, please, for a minute. I want to think.”

It was a very long minute. The young heiress spent it in gazing abstractedly at the buttons on the coachman’s back, and the rapt expression on her face seemed to tell more of a pleasant day-dream than of serious mental travail. Miss Wilcox was accustomed to these moods which called for silence, and offered no protest.

At last Kate spoke, with a tone of affectionate command. “When we get to the house I will give you a book to read, and I want you to finish every word of it before you begin anything else. It is called ‘All Sorts and Conditions of Men,’ and it tells how a lovely girl with whole millions of pounds did good in England, and I was thinking of it all the while we sat there in the shop. Only the mortification of it is, that in the book the rich girl originated the idea herself, whereas I had to have it hammered into my head by—by others. But you must read the book, and hurry with it, because—or no: I will get another copy to read again myself. And I will buy other copies; one for her and one for him, and one—”

She lapsed suddenly into silence again. The disparity between the stupendous dream out of which the People’s Palace for East London’s mighty hive of millions has been evolved, and the humble project of a sitting-room or two for the factory-girls of a village, rose before her vision, and had the effect of making her momentarily ridiculous in her own eyes. The familiarity, too, with which she had labelled these two strangers, this lawyer and this milliner, in her own thoughts, as “him” and “her,” jarred just a little upon her maidenly consciousness. Perhaps she had rushed to embrace their scheme with too much avidity. It was generally her fault to be over-impetuous. Had she been so in this case?

“Of course, what we can do here”—she began with less eagerness of tone, thinking aloud rather than addressing Tabitha—“must at best be on a very small scale. You must not be frightened by the book, where everything is done with fairy prodigality, and the lowest figures dealt with are hundreds of thousands. I only want you to read it that you may catch the spirit of it, and so understand how I feel. And you needn’t worry about my wasting money, or doing anything foolish, you dear, timid old soul!”

Miss Wilcox, in her revolving mental processes, had somehow veered around to an attitude of moderate sympathy with the project, the while she listened to these words. “I’m sure you won’t, my dear,” she replied, quite sweetly. “And I daresay there can really be a great deal of good done, only, of course, it will have to be gone at cautiously and by degrees. And we must let old Runkle do the papering and whitewashing; don’t forget that. He’s had ever so much sickness in his family all the winter, and work is so slack.”

“Do you know, I like your Mr. Tracy!” was Kate’s irrelevant reply. She made it musingly, as if the idea were new to her mind.

“You can see for yourself there couldn’t have been anything at all in that spiteful Sarah Cheese-borough’s talk about him and her,” said Tabitha, who now felt herself to have been all along the champion of this injured couple. “How on earth a respectable woman can invent such slanders beats my comprehension.”

Kate Minster laughed merrily aloud. “It’s lucky you weren’t made of pancake batter, Tabitha,” she said with mock gravity; “for, if you had been, you never could have stood this being stirred both ways. You would have turned heavy and been spoiled.”

“Instead of which I live to spoil other people, eh?” purred the gratified old lady, shaking her curls with affectionate pride.

“If we weren’t out in the street, I believe I should kiss you, Tabitha,” said the girl. “You can’t begin to imagine how delightfully you have behaved today!”

CHAPTER XVII.—TRACY HEARS STRANGE THINGS.

REUBEN’S first impulse, when he found himself alone in the little shop with his former pupil, was to say good-by and get out as soon as he could. To the best of his recollection, he had never before been in a store consecrated entirely to the fashions and finery of the opposite sex, and he was oppressed by a sense of being an intruder upon an exclusively feminine domain. The young girl, too, whom he had been thinking of all this while as an unfortunate child whom he must watch over and be good to, stood revealed before him as a self-controlled and sophisticated woman, only a few years younger than himself in actual age, and much wiser than himself in the matters of head-gear and textures and colors which belonged to this place. He could have talked freely to her in his law-office, with his familiar accessories of papers and books about him. A background of bonnets was disconcerting.

“How beautiful she is!” were Jessica’s first words, and they pleasurably startled the lawyer from his embarrassed revery.

“She is, indeed,” he answered, and somehow found himself hoping that the conversation would cling to this subject a good while. “I had never met her before, as you saw, but of course I have known her by sight a long time.”

“I don’t think I ever saw her before to-day,” said Jessica. “How wonderful it seems that she should have come, and then that you came, too, and that you both should like the plan, and take it up so, and make a success of it right at the start.”

Reuben smiled. “In your eagerness to keep up with the procession I fear you are getting ahead of the band,” he said. “I wouldn’t quite call it a success, at present. But, no doubt, it’s a great thing to have her enlisted in it. I’m glad she likes you; her friendship will make all the difference in the world to you, here in Thessaly.”

The girl did not immediately answer, and Tracy, looking at her as she walked across to the showcase, was surprised to catch the glisten of tears on her eyelashes. He had no idea what to say, but waited in pained puzzlement for her to speak.

“‘Friendship’ is not quite the word,” she said at last, looking up at him and smiling with mournful softness through her tears. “I shall be glad if she likes me—as you say, it will be a great thing if she helps me—but we shall hardly be ‘friends,’ you know. She would never call it that. Oh, no! oh, no!”

Her voice trembled audibly over these last words, and she began hurriedly to re-arrange some of the articles in the showcase, with the obvious design of masking her emotion.

“You can do yourself no greater harm than by exaggerating that kind of notion, my girl,” said Reuben Tracy, in his old gravely kind voice. “You would put thoughts into her head that way which she had never dreamt of otherwise; that is, if she weren’t a good and sensible person. Why, she is a woman like yourself—”

“Oh, no, no! Not like me!”

Tracy was infinitely touched by the pathos of this deprecating wail, but he went on as if he had not heard it: “A woman like yourself, with a heart turned in mercy and charity toward other women who are not so strong to help themselves. Why on earth should you vex your soul with fears that she will be unkind to you, when she showed you as plain as the noonday sun her desire to be kind? You mustn’t yield to such fancies.”

“Kind, yes! But you don’t understand—you can’t understand. I shouldn’t have spoken as I did. It was a mere question of a word, anyway.”

Jessica smiled again, to show that, though the tears were still there, the grief behind them was to be regarded as gone, and added, “Yes, she was kindness itself.”

“She is very rich in her own right, I believe, and if her interest in your project is genuine—that is, of the kind that lasts—you will hardly need any other assistance. Of course you must allow for the chance of her dropping the idea as suddenly as she picked it up. Rich women—rich people generally, for that matter—are often flighty about such things. ‘Put not your trust in princes,’ serves as a warning about millionnaires as well as monarchs. The rest of us are forced to be more or less continuous in what we think and do. We have to keep at the things we’ve started, because a waste of time would be serious to us. We have to keep the friends and associates we’ve got, because others are not to be had for the asking. But these favored people are more free—their time doesn’t matter, and they can find new sets of friends ready made whenever they weary of the others. Still, let us hope she will be steadfast. She has a strong face, at all events.”

The girl had listened to this substantial dissertation with more or less comprehension, but with unbounded respect. Anything that Reuben Tracy said she felt must be good. Besides, his conclusion jumped with her hopes.

“I’m not afraid of her losing interest in the thing itself,” she answered. “What worries me is—or, no—” She stopped herself with a smile, and made haste to add, “I forgot. I mustn’t be worried. But who is our Miss Minster? Does she own the ironworks? Tell me about her.”

“She owns a share of the works, I think. I don’t know how big a share, or, in fact, much else about her. I’ve heard my partner, Horace Boyce, talk lately a good deal—”

Tracy did not finish his sentence, for Jessica had sunk suddenly into the chair behind the case, and was staring at him over the glass-bound row of bonnets with wide-open, startled eyes.

“Your partner! Yours, did you say? That man?”

Her tone and manner very much surprised Reuben. “Why, yes, he’s my partner,” he said, slowly and in wonderment. “Didn’t you know that? We’ve been together since December.”

She shook her head, and murmured something hastily about having been very busy, and being cooped up on a back street.

This did not explain her agitation, which more and more puzzled Reuben as he thought upon it. He stood looking down upon her where she sat, and noted that her face, though it was turned away from him now, was both pale and excited.

“Do you know him?” he asked finally.

She shook her head again, and the lawyer fancied she was biting her lips. He did not know well what else to say, and was speculating whether it would not be best to say nothing, when all at once she burst forth vehemently.

“I won’t lie to you!” she exclaimed. “I did know him, very much to my cost. And, oh! don’t you trust him! Don’t you trust him, I say! He’s not fit to be with you. Oh, my God!—don’t I know Horace Boyce!”

Reuben stood silent, still looking down gravely into the girl’s flashing eyes. What she had said annoyed and disturbed him, but what he thought chiefly about was how to avoid bringing on an explanation which must wound and humiliate her feelings. It was clear enough what she meant, and he compassionately hoped she would not feel it necessary to add anything. Above all things he felt that he wanted to spare her pain.

“I understand,” he said at last, as the frankest way out of the dilemma. “Don’t say any more.” He pondered for a minute or so upon the propriety of not saying anything more himself, and then with decision offered her his hand across the showcase, and held hers in his expansive clasp with what he took to be fatherly sympathy, as he said:

“I must go now. Good-by. And I shall hear from you soon about the project?” He smiled to reassure her, and added, still holding her hand, “Now, don’t you let worry come inside these doors at all. You have made a famous start, and everything will go well, believe me.”

Then he went out, and the shrill clamor of the bell hung to jangle when the door was opened woke Jessica from her day-dream, just as the sunbeams had begun to drive away the night.

She rose with a start, and walked to the door to follow his retiring figure through the glass. She stood there, lost in another revery—vague, languorous, half-bright, half-hideous—until the door from the back room was opened, and Samantha’s sharp voice fell on the silence of the little shop.

“I ain’t going to set in that poky old kitchen any longer for all the bonnets in your whole place,” she remarked, with determination, advancing to the mirror with the toque on her truculently poised head.

“Besides, you said you’d call us when they were all gone.”

Lucinda stole up to her sister-employer, and murmured in a side-long whisper: “I couldn’t keep her from listening a little. You talked too loud. She heard what you said about that Boyce chap.”

The tidings angered Jessica even more than they alarmed her. With an impulse equally illogical and natural, she frowned at Samantha, and stiffened her fingers claw-wise, with a distinct itching to tear that arrangement of bronze velvet and sage-green feathers from her perfidious sister’s head.

Curiously enough, it was the usually aggressive Lucinda who counselled prudence. “If I was you, I’d ask her to stay to dinner,” she said, in the same furtive undertone. “I’ve been talking to her, and I guess she’ll be all right if we make it kind o’ pleasant for her when she comes. But if you rub her the wrong way, she’ll scratch.”

Samantha was asked to dinner, and stayed, and later, being offered her choice of three hat-pins with heads of ornamented jet, took two.

Reuben walked slowly back to the office, and then sat through a solitary meal at a side-table in the Dearborn House dining-room, although his customary seat was at the long table down the centre, in order that he might think over what he had heard.

It is not clear that the isolated fact disclosed to him in the milliner’s shop would, in itself, have been sufficient to awaken in his mind any serious distrust of his partner. As the sexes have different trainings and different spheres, so they have different standards. Men set up the bars, for instance, against a brother who cheats at cards, or divulges what he has heard in his club, or borrows money which he cannot repay, or pockets cigars at feasts when he does not himself smoke. But their courts of ethics do not exercise jurisdiction over sentimental or sexual offences, as a rule. These the male instinct vaguely refers to some other tribunal, which may or may not be in session somewhere else. And this male instinct is not necessarily co-existent with immoral tendencies, or blunted sensibilities, or even indifference: it is the man’s way of looking at it—just as it is his way to cross a muddy street on his toes, while his sisters perform the same feat on their heels.

Reuben Tracy was a good man, and one with keen aspirations toward honorable and ennobling things; but still he was a man, and it may be that this discovery, standing by itself, would not seriously have affected his opinion of Horace. But it did not stand by itself.

In an indefinite kind of way, he was conscious of being less attracted by the wit and sparkling smalltalk of Horace than he had been at first. Somehow, the young man seemed to have exhausted his store; he began to repeat himself, as if he had already made the circuit of the small ring around which his mind travelled. Reuben confronted a suspicion that the Boyce soil was shallow.

This might not be necessarily an evil thing, he said to himself. Lawyers quite often achieved notable successes before juries, who were not deep or well-grounded men. Horace was versatile, and versatility was a quality which Reuben distinctly lacked. From that point of view the combination ought, therefore, to be of value.

But, then, Horace told lies. Versatility of that variety was not so admirable. There could be no doubt on this point. Reuben could count on his fingers now six separate falsehoods that his partner had already told him. They happened not to be upon vital or even important subjects, but that did not render them the more palatable.

And then there was the Minster business. He knew from other sources that Horace had been intrusted with the papers left to Mr. Clarke’s executors. The young man had taken them to his father’s house, and had never mentioned so much as a syllable about them to his partner. No doubt, Horace felt that he ought to have this as his personal business, and upon the precedent Reuben himself had set with the railroad work, this was fair enough. But there was something underhanded in his secrecy about the matter. He should have spoken of it.

Reuben’s thoughts from this drifted to the Minsters themselves, and centred reverently upon the luminous figure of that elder daughter whom he had met an hour before. He did not dwell much upon her beauty—perhaps he was a trifle dull about such things—but her graciousness, her sweet interest in the charity, her womanly commingling of softness and enthusiasm, seemed to shine about him as he mused. Thessaly unconsciously assumed a brighter and more wholesome aspect, with much less need of reform than before, in his mind’s eye, now that he thought of it as her home.

Her home! The prosperous and respected lawyer was still a country boy in his unformed speculations as to what that home might be like. The Minster house was the most splendid mansion in Dearborn County, it was said, but his experience with mansions was small. A hundred times it had been said to him that he could go anywhere if he liked, and he gave the statement credence enough. But somehow it happened that he had not gone. To “be in society,” as the phrase went, had not seemed important to him. Now, almost for the first time, he found himself regretting this. Then he smiled somewhat scowlingly at his plate as the vagrant reflection came up that his partner contributed social status as well as versatility and mendacity to the outfit of the firm. Horace Boyce had a swallowtail coat, and visited at the Minsters’. The reflection was not altogether grateful to him.

Reuben rose from the table, and stood for a few moments by the window overlooking the veranda and the side street. The sunny warmth of the thawing noon-day had made it possible to have the window open, and the sound of voices close at hand showed that there were people already anticipating pneumonia and the springtime by sitting on the porch outside.

These voices conveyed no distinct impression at first to Reuben’s mind, busy as he was with his own reflections. But all at once there was a scraping of feet and chair-legs on the floor, signifying that the party had risen, and then he heard two remarks which made a sharp appeal to his attention and interest.

The first voice said: “Mind, I’m not going to let you put me into a hole. What I do, I do only when it has been proved to me to be to my own interest, and not at all because I’m afraid of you. Understand that clearly!”

The other voice replied: “All that you need be afraid of is that you will kick over your own bucket of milk. You’ve got the whole game in your hands, if you only listen to me and don’t play it like a fool. What do you say? Shall we go up to your house and put the thing into shape? We can be alone there.”

The voices ceased, and there was a sound of footsteps descending from the porch to the sidewalk. The two men passed before the window, ducking their heads for protection against the water dripping from the overflowed eaves on the roof of the veranda, and thus missing sight of the man who had overheard them.

Reuben had known at once by the sound of the voice that the first speaker was Horace Boyce. He recognized his companion now as Schuyler Tenney, and the sight startled him.

Just why it should have done so, he could not have explained. He had seen this Schuyler Tenney almost every day for a good many years, putting them all together, and had never before been troubled, much less alarmed, by the spectacle. But coming now upon what Jessica had told him, and what his own thoughts had evolved, and what he had inadvertently overheard, the figure of the rising hardware merchant loomed darkly in his perturbed fancy as an evil and threatening thing.

A rustic client with a grievance sought Tracy out in the seclusion of the dining-room, and dragged him back to his office and into the intricacies of the law of trespass; but though he did his best to listen and understand, the farmer went away feeling that his lawyer was a considerably overrated man.

For, strive as he might, Reuben could not get the sound of those words, “you’ve got the whole game in your hands,” out of his ears, or restrain his mind from wearying itself with the anxious puzzle of guessing what that game could be.

CHAPTER XVIII.—A SIMPLE BUSINESS TRANSACTION.

Mr. Schuyler Tenney had never before been afforded an opportunity of studying a young gentleman of fashion and culture in the intimacy of his private apartments, and he looked about Horace’s room with lively curiosity and interest, when the two conspirators had entered the General’s house, gone up-stairs, and shut doors behind them.

“It looks like a ninety-nine-cent store, for all the world,” was his comment when he had examined the bric-à-brac on the walls and mantels, “hefted” a bronze trifle or two on the table, and taken a comprehensive survey of the furniture and hangings.

“It’s rather bare than otherwise,” said Horace, carelessly. “I got a tolerably decent lot of traps together when I had rooms in Jermyn Street, but I had to let most of them go when I pulled up stakes to come home.”

“German Street? I suppose that is in Germany?”

“No—London.”

“Oh! Sold ’em because you got hard up?”

“Not at all. But this damned tariff of yours—or ours—makes it cost too much to bring decent things over here.”

“Protection to American industry, my boy,” said Mr. Tenney, affably. “We couldn’t get on a fortnight without it. Just think what—”

“Oh, hang it all, man! We didn’t come here to talk tariff!” Horace broke in, with a smile which was half annoyance.

“No, that’s so,” assented Mr. Tenney, settling himself in the low, deep-backed easy-chair, and putting the tips of his lean fingers together. “No, we didn’t, for a fact.” He added, after a moment’s pause: “I guess I’ll have to rig up a room like this myself, when the thing comes off.” He smiled icily to himself at the thought.

“Meanwhile, let us talk about the ‘thing,’ as you call it. Will you have a drink?”

“Never touch it,” said Mr. Tenney, and he looked curiously on while Horace poured out some brandy, and then opened a bottle of soda-water to go with it. He was particularly impressed by the little wire frame-work stand made to hold the round-bottomed bottle, and asked its cost, and wondered if they wouldn’t be a good thing to keep in the store.

“Now to business!” said Horace, dragging out from under a sofa the black tin box which held the Minster papers, and throwing back its cover. “I’ve told you pretty well what there is in here.”

Mr. Tenney took from his pocket-book the tabular statement Horace had made of the Minster property, and smoothed it out over his pointed knee.

“It’s a very pretty table,” he said; “no bookkeeper could have done it better. I know it by heart, but we’ll keep it here in sight while you proceed.”

“There’s nothing for me to proceed with,” said Horace, lolling back in his chair in turn. “I want to hear you! Don’t let us waste time. Broadly, what do you propose?”

“Broadly, what does everybody propose? To get for himself what somebody else has got. That’s human nature. It’s every kind of nature, down to the little chickens just hatched who start to chase the chap with the worm in his mouth before they’ve fairly got their tails out of the shell.”

“You ought to write a book, Schuyler,” said Horace, using this familiar name for the first time: “‘Tenney on Dynamic Sociology’! But I interrupted your application. What particular worm have you got in your bill’s eye?”

“We are all worms, so the Bible says. I suppose even those scrumptious ladies there come under that head, like we ordinary mortals.” Mr. Tenney pointed his agreeable metaphor by touching the paper on his knee with his joined finger-tips, and showed his small, sharpened teeth in a momentary smile.

“I follow you,” said Horace, tentatively. “Go on!”

“That’s a heap of money that you’ve ciphered out there, on that paper.”

“Yes. True, it isn’t ours, and we’ve got nothing to do with it. But that’s a detail. Go on!”

“A good deal of it can be ours, if you’ve got the pluck to go in with me.”

Horace frowned. “Upon my word, Tenney,” he said, impatiently, “what do you mean?”

“Jest what I said,” was the sententious and collected response.

The younger man laughed with an uneasy assumption of scorn. “Is it a burglary you do me the honor to propose, or only common or garden robbery? Ought we to manage a little murder in the thing, or what do you say to arson? Upon my word, man, I believe that you don’t realize that what you’ve said is an insult!”

“No, I don’t. You’re right there,” said the hardware merchant, in no wise ruffled. “But I do realize that you come pretty near being the dod-blamedest fool in Dearborn County.”

“Much obliged for the qualification, I’m sure,” retorted Horace, who felt the mists of his half-simulated, half-instinctive anger fading away before the steady breath of the other man’s purpose. “But I interrupt you. Pray go on.”

“There ain’t no question of dishonesty about the thing, not the slightest. I ain’t that kind of a man!” Horace permitted himself a shadowy smile, emphasized by a subdued little sniff, which Tenney caught and was pleased to appear to resent, “Thessaly knows me!” he said, with an air of pride. “They ain’t a living man—nor a dead one nuther—can put his finger on me. I’ve lived aboveboard, sir, and owe no man a red cent, and I defy anybody to so much as whisper a word about my character.”

“‘Tenney on Faith Justified by Works,’” commented Horace, softly, smiling as much as he dared, but in a less aggressive manner.

“Works—yes!” said the hardware merchant, “the Minster iron-works, in particular.” He seemed pleased with his little joke, and paused to dwell upon it in his mind for an instant. Then he went on, sitting upright in his chair now, and displaying a new earnestness:

“Dishonesty is wrong, and it is foolish. It gets a man disgraced, and it gets him in jail. But commercial acumen is another thing. A smart man can get money in a good many ways without giving anybody a chance to call him dishonest. I have thought out several plans—some of them strong at one point, others at another, but all pretty middlin’ good—how to feather our own nests out of this thing.”

“Well?” said Horace, interrogatively.

Mr. Tenney did not smile any more, and he had done with digressions. “First of all,” he said, with his intent gray eyes fixed on the young man’s face, “what guarantee have I that you won’t give me away?”

“What guarantee can I give you?” replied Horace, also sitting up.

“Perhaps you are right,” said Tenney, thinking in his own swift-working mind that it would be easy enough to take care of this poor creature later on. “Well, then, you’ve been appointed Mrs. Minster’s lawyer in the interest of the Thessaly Manufacturing Company—this company here marked ‘D,’ in which the family has one hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars.”

“I gathered as much. Perhaps you wouldn’t mind telling me what it is all about.”

“I’m as transparent as plate-glass when I think a man is acting square with me,” said the hardware merchant. “This is how it is. Wendover and me got hold of a little rolling-mill and nail-works at Cadmus, down on the Southern Tier, a few years ago. Some silly people had put up the money for it, and there was a sort of half-crazy inventor fellow running it. They were making ducks and drakes of the whole thing, and I saw a chance of getting into the concern—I used to buy a good deal of hardware from them, and knew how they stood—and I spoke to Wendover, and so we went in.”

“That means that the other people were put out, I suppose,” commented Horace.

“Well, no; but they kind o’ faded away like. I wouldn’t exactly say they were put out, but after a while they didn’t seem to be able to stay in. But never mind them. Well, Cadmus was a bad location. The iron fields around there had pretty well petered out, and we were way off the main line of transportation. Business was fair enough; we made a straight ten per cent, year in and year out, because the thing was managed carefully; but that was in spite of a lot of drawbacks. So I got a scheme in my head to move the whole concern up here to Thessaly, and hitch it up with the Minster iron-works. We could save one dollar a ton, or forty-five thousand dollars in all, in the mere matter of freight alone, if we could use up their entire output. I may tell you, I didn’t appear in the business at all. I daresay Mrs. Minster don’t know to this day that I’m a kind of partner of hers. It happened that Wendover used to know her when she was a girl—they both come from down the Hudson somewhere—and so he worked the thing with her, and we moved over from Cadmus, hook, line, bob, and sinker, and we’re the Thessaly Manufacturing Company. Do you see?”

“So far, yes. She and her daughters have one hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars cash in it. What is the rest of the company like?”

“It’s stocked at four hundred thousand dollars. We put in all our plant and machinery and business and good-will and so on at one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and then we furnished seventy-five thousand dollars cash. So we hold two hundred and twenty-five shares to their one hundred and seventy-five.”

“Who are the ‘we’?”

“Well, Pete Wendover and me are about the only people you’re liable to meet around the premises, I guess. There are some other names on the books, but they don’t amount to much. We can wipe them off whenever we like.”

“I notice that this company has paid no dividends since it was formed.”

“That’s because of the expense of building. And we ain’t got what you may call fairly to work yet. But it’s all right. There is big money in it.”

“I daresay,” observed Horace. “But, if you will excuse the remark, I seem to have missed that part of your statement which referred to my making something out of the company.”

The hardware merchant allowed his cold eyes to twinkle for an instant. “You’ll be taken care of,” he said, confidentially. “Don’t fret your gizzard about that!”

Horace smiled. It seemed to be easier to get on with Tenney than he had thought. “But what am I to do; that is, if I decide to do anything?” he asked. “I confess I don’t see your scheme.”

“Why, that’s curious,” said the other, with an air of candor. “And you lawyers have the name of being so ’cute, too!”

“I don’t suppose we see through a stone wall much farther than other people. Our chief advantage is in being able to recognize that it is a wall. And this one of yours seems to be as thick and opaque as most, I’m bound to say.”

“We don’t want you to do anything, just now,” Mr. Tenney explained. “Things may turn up in which you can be of assistance, and then we want to count on you, that’s all.”