Four days of anxious meditation did not help Horace Boyce to clear his mind, and on the fifth he determined upon a somewhat desperate step, in the hope that its issue would assist decision.

His dilemma was simple enough in character. Two ways of acquiring a fortune lay before him. One was to marry Kate Minster; the other was to join the plot against her property and that of her family, which the subtile Tenney was darkly shaping.

The misery of the situation was that he must decide at once which of the ways he would choose. In his elation at being selected as the legal adviser and agent of these millionnaire women, no such contingency as this had been foreseen. He had assumed that abundant time would be at his disposal, and he had said to himself that with time all things may be accomplished with all women.

But this precious element of time had been harshly cut out of his plans, here at the very start. The few days reluctantly granted him had gone by, one by one, with cruel swiftness, and to-morrow would be Monday—and still his mind was not made up.

If he could be assured that Miss Minster would marry him, or at least admit him to the vantage-ground of quasi-recognition as a suitor, the difficulty would be solved at once. He would turn around and defend her and her people against the machinations of Tenney. Just what the machinations were he could not for the life of him puzzle out, but he felt sure that, whatever their nature, he could defeat them, if only he were given the right to do battle in the name of the family, as a prospective member of it.

On the other hand, it might be that he had no present chance with Miss Minster as an eligible husband. What would happen if he relied on a prospect which turned out not to exist? His own opportunity to share in the profits of Tenney’s plan would be abruptly extinguished, and his father would be thrown upon the world as a discredited bankrupt. About that there was no doubt.

Sometimes the distracted young man thought he caught glimpses of a safe middle course. In these sanguine moments it seemed feasible to give in his adhesion to Tenney’s scheme, and go along with him for a certain time, say until the intentions of the conspirators were revealed. Then he might suddenly revolt, throw himself into a virtuous attitude, and win credit and gratitude at the hands of the family by protecting them from their enemies. Then the game would be in his own hands, and no mistake!

But there were other times when this course did not present so many attractions to his mind—when it was borne in upon him that Tenney would be a dangerous kind of man to betray. He had seen merciless and terrible depths in the gray eyes of the hardware merchant—depths which somehow suggested bones stripped clean of their flesh, sucked bare of their marrow, at the bottom of a gloomy sea. In these seasons of doubt, which came mostly in the early morning when he first awoke, the mere thought of Tenney’s hatred made him shudder. It was as if Hugo’s devil-fish had crawled into his dreams.

So Sunday afternoon came and found the young man still perplexed and harassed. To do him justice, he had once or twice dwelt momentarily on the plan of simply defying Tenney and doing his duty by the Minsters, and taking his chances. But these impulses were as quickly put down. The case was too complicated for mere honesty. The days of martyrdom were long since past. One needed to be smarter than one’s neighbors in these later times. To eat others was the rule now, if one would save himself from being devoured. It was at least clear to his mind that he must be smart, and play his hand so as to get the odd trick even if honors were held against him.

Horace decided finally that the wisest thing he could do would be to call upon the Minsters before nightfall, and trust to luck for some opportunity of discovering Miss Kate’s state of mind toward him. He was troubled more or less by fears that Sunday might not be regarded in Thessaly as a proper day for calls, as he dressed himself for the adventure. But when he got upon the street, the fresh air and exhilaration oc exercise helped to reassure him. Before he reached the Minster gate he had even grown to feel that the ladies had probably had a dull day of it, and would welcome his advent as a diversion.

He was shown into the stately parlor to the left of the wide hall—a room he had not seen before—and left to sit there in solitude for some minutes. This term of waiting he employed in looking over the portraits on the wall and the photographs on the mantels and tables. Aside from several pictures of the dissipated Minster boy who had died, he could see no faces of young men anywhere, and he felt this to be a good sign as he tiptoed his way back to his seat by the window.

Fortune smiled at least upon the opening of his enterprise. It was Miss Kate who came at last to receive him, and she came alone. The young man’s cultured sense of beauty and breeding was caressed and captivated as it had never been before—at least in America, he made mental reservation—as she came across the room toward him, and held out her hand. He felt himself unexpectedly at ease, as he returned her greeting and looked with smiling warmth into her splendid eyes.

His talk was facile and pleasant. He touched lightly upon his doubts as to making calls on Sunday, and how they were overborne by the unspeakable tedium of his own rooms. Then he spoke of the way the more unconventional circles of London utilize the day, and of the contrasting features of the Continental Sunday. Miss Kate seemed interested, and besides explaining that her mother was writing letters and that her sister was not very well, bore a courteous and affable part in the exchange of small-talk.

For a long time nothing was said which enabled Horace to feel that the purpose of his visit had been or was likely to be served. Then, all at once, through a most unlikely channel, the needed personal element was introduced.

“Mamma tells me,” she said, when a moment’s pause had sufficed to dismiss some other subject, “that she has turned over to you such of her business as poor old Mr. Clarke used to take care of, and that your partner, Mr. Tracy, has nothing to do with that particular branch of your work. Isn’t that unusual? I thought partners always shared everything.”

“Oh, not at all,” replied Horace. “Mr. Tracy, for example, has railroad business which he keeps to himself. He is the attorney for this section of the road, and of course that is a personal appointment. He couldn’t share it with me, any more than the man in the story could make his wife and children corporals because he had been made one himself. Besides, Mr. Tracy was expressly mentioned by your mother as not to be included in the transfer of business. It was her notion.”

“Ah, indeed!” said that young woman, with a slight instantaneous lifting of the black brows which Horace did not catch. “Why? Isn’t he nice?”

“Well, yes; he’s an extremely good fellow, in his way,” the partner admitted, looking down at his glossy boots in well-simulated hesitation. “That little word ‘nice’ means so many things upon feminine lips, you know,” he added with a smile. “Perhaps he wouldn’t answer your definition of it all around. He’s very honest, and he is a prodigious worker, but—well, to be frank, he’s farm bred, and I daresay your mother suspected the existence of—what shall I say?—an uncouth side? Really, I don’t think that there was anything more than that in it.”

“So you furnish the polish, and he the honesty and industry? Is that it?”

The words were distinctly unpleasant, and Horace looked up swiftly to the speaker’s face, feeling that his own was flushed. But Miss Kate was smiling at him, with a quizzical light dancing in her eyes, and this reassured him on the instant. Evidently she felt herself on easy terms with him, and this was merely a bit of playful chaff.

“We don’t put it quite in that way,” he said, with an answering laugh. “It would be rather egotistical, on both sides.”

“Nowadays everybody resents that imputation as if it were a cardinal sin. There was a time when self-esteem was taken for granted. I suppose it went out with chain-armor and farthingales.” She spoke in a musing tone, and added after a tiny pause, “That must have been a happy time, at least for those who wore the armor and the brocades.”

Horace leaped with avidity at the opening. “Those were the days of romance,” he said, with an effort at the cooing effect in his voice. “Perhaps they were not so altogether lovely as our fancy paints them; but, all the same, it is very sweet to have the fancy. Whether it be historically true or not, those who possess it are rich in their own mind’s right. They can always escape from the grimy and commercial conditions of this present work-a-day life. All one’s finer senses can feed, for example, on a glowing account of an old-time tournament—with the sun shining on the armor and burnished shields, and the waving plumes and iron-clad horses and the heralds in tabards, and the rows of fair ladies clustered about the throne—as it is impossible to do on the report of a meeting of a board of directors, even when they declare you an exceptionally large dividend.”

The young man kept a close watch upon this flow of words as it proceeded, and felt satisfied with it. The young woman seemed to like it too, for she had sunk back into her chair with an added air of ease, and looked at him now with what he took to be a more sympathetic glance, as she made answer:

“Why, you are positively romantic, Mr. Boyce!”

“Me? My dear Miss Minster, I am the most sentimental person alive,” Horace protested gayly.

“Don’t you find that it interferes with your profession?” she asked, with that sparkle of banter in her dark eyes which he began to find so delicious. “I thought lawyers had to eschew sentiment. Or perhaps you supply that, too, in this famous partnership of yours!”

Horace laughed with pleasure. “Would you like me the less if I admitted it?” he queried.

“How could I?” she replied on the instant, still with the smile which kept him from shaping a harsh interpretation of her words. “But isn’t Thessaly a rather incongruous place for sentimental people? We have no tourney-field—only rolling-mills and button-factories and furnaces; and there isn’t a knight, much less a herald in a tabard, left in the whole village. Their places have been taken by moulders and puddlers. So what will the minstrel do then, poor thing?”

“Let him come here sometimes,” said the young man, in the gravely ardent tone which this sort of situation demanded. “Let him come here, and forget that this is the nineteenth century; forget time and Thessaly altogether.”

“Oh, but mamma wouldn’t like that at all; I mean about your forgetting so much. She expects you particularly to remember both time and Thessaly. No, decidedly; that would never do!”

The smile and the glance were intoxicating. The young man made his plunge.

“But may I come?” His voice had become low and vibrant, and it went on eagerly: “May I come if I promise to remember everything; if I swear to remember nothing else save what you—and your mother—would have me charge my memory with?”

“We are always glad to see our friends on Tuesdays, from two to five.”

“But I am not in the plural,” he urged, gently.

“We are,” she made answer, still watching him with a smile, from where she half-reclined in the easy-chair. Her face was in the shadow of the heavier under-curtains; the mellow light gave it a uniform tint of ivory washed with rose, and enriched the wonder of her eyes, and softened into melting witchery the lines of lips and brows and of the raven diadem of curls upon her forehead.

“Yes; in that the graces and charms of a thousand perfect women are centred here in one,” murmured Horace. It was in his heart as well as his head to say more, but now she rose abruptly at this, with a laugh which for the instant disconcerted him.

“Oh, I foresee such a future for this firm of yours,” she cried, with high merriment alike in voice and face.

As they both stood in the full light of the window, the young man somehow seemed to miss that yielding softness in her face which had lulled his sense and fired his senses in the misleading shadows of the curtain. It was still a very beautiful face, but there was a great deal of self-possession in it. Perhaps it would be as well just now to go no further.

“We must try to live up to your good opinion, and your kindly forecast,” he said, as he momentarily touched the hand she offered him. “You cannot possibly imagine how glad I am to have braved the conventionalities in calling, and to have found you at home. It has transformed the rural Sunday from a burden into a beatitude.”

“How pretty, Mr. Boyce! Is there any message for mamma?”

“Oh, why did you say that?” He ventured upon a tone of mock vexation. “I wanted so much to go away with the fancy that this was an enchanted palace, and that you were shut up alone in it, waiting for—”

“Tuesdays, from two till five,” she broke in, with a bow, in the same spirit of amiable raillery, and so he said good-by and made his way out.

Had he succeeded? Was there a promise of success? Horace took a long walk before he finally turned his steps homeward, and pondered these problems excitedly in his mind. On the whole, he concluded that he could win her. That she was for herself better worth the winning than even for her million, he said to himself over and over again with rapture.

Miss Kate went up-stairs and into the sitting-room common to the sisters, in which Ethel lay on the sofa in front of the fire-place. She knelt beside this sofa, and held her hands over the subdued flame of the maple sticks on the hearth.

“It is so cold down in the parlor,” she remarked, by way of explanation.

“He stayed an unconscionable while,” said Ethel. “What could he have talked about? I had almost a mind to waive my headache and come down to find out. It was a full hour.”

“He wouldn’t have thanked you if you had, my little girl,” replied Kate with a smile.

“Does he dislike little girls of nineteen so much? How unique!”

“No; but he came to make love to the big girl; that is why.”

Ethel sat bolt upright. “You don’t mean it!” she said, with her hazel eyes wide open.

“He did,” was the sententious reply. Kate was busy warming the backs of her hands now.

“Goodness me! And I lay here all the while, and never had so much as a premonition. Oh, what was it like? Did he get on his knees? Was it very, very funny? Make haste and tell me.”

“Well, it was funny, after a fashion. At least, we both laughed a good deal.”

“How touching! Well?”

“That is all. I laughed at him, and he laughed—I suppose it must have been at me—and he paid me some quite thrilling compliments, and I replied, ‘Tuesdays, from two to five,’ like an educated jackdaw—and—that was all.”

“What a romance! How could you think of such a clever answer, right on the spur of the moment, too? But I always said you were the bright one of the family, Kate. Perhaps one’s mind works better in the cold, anyway. But I think he might have knelt down. You should have put him close to the register. I daresay the cold stiffened his joints.”

“Will you ever be serious, child?”

Ethel took her sister’s head in her hands and turned it gently, so that she might look into the other’s face.

“Is it possible that you are serious, Kate?” she asked, in tender wonderment.

The elder girl laughed, and lifted herself to sit on the sofa beside Ethel.

“No, no; of course it isn’t possible,” she said, and put her arm about the invalid’s slender waist. “But he’s great fun to talk to. I chaffed him to my heart’s content, and he saw what I meant, every time, and didn’t mind in the least, and gave me as good as I sent. It’s such a relief to find somebody you can say saucy things to, and be quite sure they understand them. I began by disliking him—and he is as conceited as a popinjay—but then he comprehended everything so perfectly, and talked so well, that positively I found myself enjoying it. And he knew his own mind, too, and was resolved to say nice things to me, and said them, whether I liked or not.”

“But did you ‘like,’ Kate?”

“No-o, I think not,” the girl replied, musingly. “But, all the same, there was a kind of satisfaction in hearing them, don’t you know.”

The younger girl drew her sister’s head down to her shoulder, and caressed it with her thin, white fingers.

“You are not going to let your mind drift into anything foolish, Kate?” she said, with a quaver of anxiety in her tone. “You don’t know the man. You don’t even like him. You told me so, even from what you saw of him on the train coming from New York. You said he patronized everybody and everything, and didn’t have a good word to say for any one. Don’t you know you did? And those first impressions are always nearest the truth.”

This recalled something to Kate’s mind. “You are right, puss,” she said. “It is a failing of his. He spoke to-day almost contemptuously of his partner—that Mr. Tracy whom I met in the milliner’s shop; and that annoyed me at the time, for I liked Mr. Tracy’s looks and talk very much indeed, I shouldn’t call him uncouth, at all.”

“That was that Boyce man’s word, was it?” commented Ethel. “Well, then, I think that beside his partner, he is a pretentious, disagreeable monkey—there!”

Kate smiled at her sister’s vehemence. “At least it is an unprejudiced judgment,” she said. “You don’t know either of them.”

“But I’ve seen them both,” replied Ethel, conclusively.