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.