SOME ten days later, Reuben Tracy was vastly surprised one afternoon to receive a note from Miss Minster. The office-boy said that the messenger was waiting for an answer, and had been warned to hand the missive to no one except him. The note ran thus:

Dear Sir: I hope very much that you can find time to call here at our house during the afternoon. Pray ask for me, and do not mention to any one that you are coming.

It will not seem to you, I am sure, that I have taken a liberty either in my request or my injunction, after you have heard the explanation. Sincerely yours,

Kate Minster.

Reuben sent back a written line to say that he would come within an hour, and then tried to devote himself to the labor of finishing promptly the task he had in hand. It was a very simple piece of conveyancing—work he generally performed with facility—but to-day he found himself spoiling sheet after sheet of “legal cap,” by stupid omissions and unconscious inversions of the quaint legal phraseology. His thoughts would not be enticed away from the subject of the note—the perfume of which was apparent upon the musty air of the office, even as it lay in its envelope before him. There was nothing remarkable in the fact that Miss Minster wanted to see him—of course, it was with reference to Jessica’s plan for the factory-girls—but the admonition to secrecy puzzled him a good deal. The word “explanation,” too, had a portentous look. What could it mean?

Mrs. Minster had been closeted in the library with her lawyer, Mr. Horace Boyce, for fully two hours that forenoon, and afterward, in the hearing of her daughters, had invited him to stay for luncheon. He had pleaded pressure of business as an excuse for not accepting the invitation, and had taken a hurried departure forthwith.

The two girls exchanged glances at all this. Mr. Boyce had never been asked before to the family table, and there was something pre-occupied, almost brusque, in his manner of declining the exceptional honor and hurrying off as he did. They noted, too, that their mother seemed unwontedly excited about something, and experience told them that her calm Knickerbocker nature was not to be stirred by trivial matters.

So, while they lingered over the jellied dainties of the light noonday meal, Kate made bold to put the question:

“Something is worrying you, mamma,” she said. “Is it anything that we know about?”

“Mercy, no!” Mrs. Minster replied. “It is nothing at all. Of course, I’m not worried. What an idea!”

“I thought you acted as if there was something on your mind,” said Kate.

“Well, you would act so, too, if—” There Mrs. Minster stopped short, and sighed.

“If what, mamma?” put in Ethel. “We knew there was something.”

“He sticks to it that issuing bonds is not mortgaging, and, of course, he ought to know; but I remember that when they bonded our town for the Harlem road, father said it was a mortgage,” answered the mother, not over luminously.

“What bonds? What mortgage?” Kate spoke with emphasis. “We have a right to know, surely!”

“However, you can see for yourself,” pursued Mrs. Minster, “that the interest must be more than made up by the extra price iron will bring when the trust puts up prices. That is what trusts are for—to put up prices. You can read that in the papers every day.”

“Mother, what have you done?”

Kate had pushed back her plate, and leaned over the table now, flashing sharp inquiry into her mother’s face.

“What have you done?” she repeated. “I insist upon knowing, and so does Ethel.”

Mrs. Minster’s wise and resolute countenance never more thoroughly belied the condition of her mind than at this moment. She felt that she did not rightly know just what she had done, and vague fears as to consequences rose to possess her soul.

“If I had spoken to my mother in that way when I was your age, I should have been sent from the room—big girl though I was. I’m sure I can’t guess where you take your temper from. The Mauverensens were always——”

This was not satisfactory, and Kate broke into the discourse about her maternal ancestors peremptorily:

“I don’t care about all that. But some business step has been taken, and it must concern Ethel and me, and I wish you would tell us plainly what it is.”

“The Thessaly Company found it necessary to buy the right of a new nail machine, and they had to have money to do it with, and so some bonds are to be issued to provide it. It is quite the customary thing, I assure you, in business affairs. Only, what I maintained was that it was the same as a mortgage, but Judge Wendover and Mr. Boyce insisted it wasn’t.”

It is, perhaps, an interesting commentary upon the commercial education of these two wealthy young ladies, that they themselves were unable to form an opinion upon this debated point.

“Bonds are something like stocks,” Ethel explained. “They are always mentioned together. But mortgages must be different, for they are kept in the county clerk’s office. I know that, because Ella Dupont’s father used to get paid fifty cents apiece for searching after them there. She told me so. They must have been very careless to lose them so often.”

Mrs. Minster in some way regarded this as a defence of her action, and took heart. “Well, then, I also signed an agreement which puts us into the great combination they’re getting up—all the iron manufacturers of Pennsylvania and Ohio and New York—called the Amalgamated Pig-Iron Trust. I was very strongly advised to do that; and it stands to reason that prices will go up, because trusts limit production. Surely, that is plain enough.”

“You ought to have consulted us,” said Kate, not the less firmly because her advice, she knew, would have been of no earthly value. “You have a power-of-attorney to sign for us, but it was really for routine matters, so that the property might act as a whole. In a great matter like this, I think we should have known about it first.”

“But you don’t know anything about it now, even when I have told you!” Mrs. Minster pointed out, not without justification for her triumphant tone. “It is perfectly useless for us women to try and understand these things. Our only safety is in being advised by men who do know, and in whom we have perfect confidence.”

“But Mr. Boyce is a very young man, and you scarcely know him,” objected Ethel.

“He was strongly recommended to me by Judge Wendover,” replied the mother.

“And pray who recommended Judge Wendover?” asked Kate, with latent sarcasm.

“Why, he was bom in the same town with me!” said Mrs. Minster, as if no answer could be more sufficient. “My grandfather Douw Mauverensen’s sister married a Wendover.”

“But about the bonds,” pursued the eldest daughter. “What amount of money do they represent?”

“Four hundred thousand dollars.”

The girls opened their eyes at this, and their mother hastened to add: “But it really isn’t very important, when you come to look at it. It is only what Judge Wendover calls making one hand wash the other. The money raised on the bonds will put the Thessaly Company on its feet, and so then that will pay dividends, and so we will get back the interest, and more too. The bonds we can buy back whenever we choose. I managed that, because when Judge Wendover said the bonds would be perfectly good, I said, ‘If they are so good, why don’t you take them yourself?’ And he seemed struck with that and said he would. They didn’t get much the best of me there!”

Somehow this did not seem very clear to Kate. “If he had the money to take the bonds, what was the need of any bonds at all?” she asked. “Why didn’t he buy this machinery himself?”

“It wouldn’t have been regular; there was some legal obstacle in the way,” the mother replied. “He explained it to me, but I didn’t quite catch it. At all events, there had to be bonds. Even he couldn’t see any way ont of that.”

“Well, I hope it is all right,” said Kate, and the conversation lapsed.

But upon reflection, in her own room, the matter seemed less and less all right, and finally, after a long and not very helpful consultation with her sister, Kate suddenly thought of Reuben Tracy. A second later she had fully decided to ask his advice, and swift upon this rose the resolve to summon him immediately.

Thus it was that the perfumed note came to be sent.

Reuben took the seat in the drawing-room of the Minsters indicated by the servant who had admitted him, and it did not occur to this member of the firm of Tracy & Boyce to walk about and look at the pictures, much less to wonder how many of them were of young men.

Even in this dull light he could recognize, on the opposite wall, a boyhood portrait of the Stephen Minster, Junior, whose early death had dashed so many hopes, and pointed so many morals to the profit of godly villagers. He thought about this worthless, brief career, as his eyes rested on the bright, boyish face of the portrait, with the clear dark eyes and the fresh-tinted cheeks, and his serious mind filled itself with protests against the conditions which had made of this heir to millions a rake and a fool. There was no visible reason why Stephen Minster’s son should not have been clever and strong, a fit master of the great part created for him by his father. There must be some blight, some mysterious curse upon hereditary riches here in America, thought Reuben, for all at once he found himself persuaded that this was the rule with most rich men’s sons. Therein lay a terrible menace to the Republic, he said to himself. Vague musings upon the possibility of remedying this were beginning to float in his brain—the man could never contemplate injustices, great or small, without longing to set them right—when the door opened and the tall young elder daughter of the Minsters entered.

Reuben rose and felt himself making some such obeisance before her in spirit as one lays at the feet of a queen. What he did in reality or what he said, left no record on his memory.

He had been seated again for some minutes, and had listened with the professional side of his mind to most of what story she had to tell, before he regained control of his perceptions and began to realize that the most beautiful woman he had ever seen was confiding to him her anxieties, as a friend even more than as a lawyer. The situation was so wonderful that it needed all the control he had over his faculties to grasp and hold it. Always afterward he thought of the moment in which his confusion of mind vanished, and he, sitting on the sofa facing her chair, was able to lean back a little and talk as if he had known her a long time, as the turning-point in his whole life.

What it was in her power to tell him about the transaction which had frightened her did not convey a very clear idea to his mind. A mortgage of four hundred thousand dollars had been placed upon the Minsters’ property to meet the alleged necessities of a company in which they were large owners, and their own furnaces had been put under the control of a big trust formed by other manufacturers, presumably for the benefit of all its members. This was what he made out of her story.

“On their face,” he said, “these things seem regular enough. The doubtful point, of course, would be whether, in both transactions, your interests and those of your family were perfectly safe-guarded. This is something I can form no opinion about. But Mr. Boyce must have looked out for that and seen that you got ‘value received.’”

“Ah, Mr. Boyce! That is just the question,” Kate answered, swiftly. “Has he looked out for it?”

“Curiously enough he has never spoken with me, even indirectly, about having taken charge of your mother’s business,” replied Reuben, slowly. “But he is a competent man, with a considerable talent for detail, and a good knowledge of business, as well as of legal forms. I should say you might be perfectly easy about his capacity to guard your interests; oh, yes, entirely easy.”

“It isn’t his capacity that I was thinking about,” said the young woman, hesitatingly. “I wanted to ask you about him himself—about the man.”

Reuben smiled in an involuntary effort to conceal his uneasiness. “They say that no man is a hero to his valet, you know,” he made answer. “In the same way business men ought not to be cross-examined on the opinions which the community at large may have concerning their partners. Boyce and I occupy, in a remote kind of way, the relations of husband and wife. We maintain a public attitude toward each other of great respect and admiration, and are bound to do so by the same rules which govern the heads of a family. And we mustn’t talk about each other. You never would go to one of a married couple for an opinion about the other. If the opinion were all praise, you would set it down to prejudice; if it were censure, the fact of its source would shock you. Oh, no, partners mustn’t discuss each other. That would be letting all the bars down with a vengeance.”

He had said all this with an effort at lightness, and ended, as he had begun, with a smile. Kate, looking intently into his face, did not smile in response. He thought her expression was one of disappointment.

“Perhaps I was wrong to ask you,” she answered, after a little pause, and in a colder tone. “You men do stand by each other so splendidly. It is the secret of your strength. It is why your sex possesses the earth, and the fulness thereof.”

It was easier for Reuben to smile naturally this time. “But I illustrated my position by an example of a still finer reticence,” he said; “the finest one can imagine—that of husband and wife.”

“You are not married, I believe, Mr. Tracy,” was her comment, and its edge was apparent.

“No,” he said, and stopped short. No other words came to his tongue, and his thoughts seemed to have gone away into somebody else’s mind, leaving only a formless blank, over which hung, like a canopy of cloud, a depressing uneasiness lest his visit should not, after all, turn out a success.

“Then you think I have needlessly worried myself,” she was saying when he came back into mental life again.

“Not altogether that, either,” he replied, moving in his seat, and sitting upright like a man who has shaken himself out of a disposition to doze. “So far as you have described them, the transactions may easily be all right. Everything depends upon details which you cannot give. The sum seems a large one to raise for the purchase of machinery, and it might be well to inquire into the exact nature and validity of the purchase. As for the terms upon which you lend the money to the company, of course Mr. Boyce has secured those. In the matter of the trust, I cannot speak at all. The idea is hateful to me, personally. All such combinations excite my anger. But as a business operation it may improve your property; always assuming that you are capably and fairly represented in the control of the trust. I suppose Mr. Boyce has attended to that.”

“But don’t you see,” broke in the girl, “it is all Mr. Boyce! It is to be assumed that he will do this, to be taken for granted he will do that, to be hoped that he has done the other. That is what I am anxious about. Has he done these things? Will he do them?”

“And that, of course, is what I cannot tell you,” said Reuben. “How can I know?”

“But you can find out.”

The lawyer knitted his ordinarily placid brows for a moment in thought. Then he slowly shook his head. “I am afraid not,” he said, slowly. “I should be very angry if the railroad people, for example, set him to examining what I had done for them; angry with him, especially, for accepting such a commission.”

“I am sorry, Mr. Tracy, if I seem to have proposed anything dishonorable to you,” Miss Kate responded, with added formality in voice and manner. “I did not mean to.”

“How could I imagine such a thing?” said Reuben, more readily than was his wont. “I only sought to make a peculiar situation clear to you, who are not familiar with such things. If I asked him questions, or meddled in the matter at all, he would resent it; and by usage he would be justified in resenting it. That is how it stands.”

“Then you cannot help me, after all!” She spoke despondingly now, with the low, rich vibration in her tone which Reuben had dwelt so often on in memory since he first heard it. “And I had counted so much upon your aid,” she added, with a sigh.

“I would do a great deal to be of use to you,” the young man said, earnestly, and looked her in the face with calm frankness; “a great deal, Miss Minster, but—”

“Yes, but that ‘but’ means everything. I repeat, in this situation you can do nothing.”

“I cannot take a brief against my partner.”

“I should not suggest that again, Mr. Tracy,” she interposed. “I can see that I was wrong there, and you were right.”

“Don’t put it in that way. There was no question of wrong or right. I merely pointed out a condition of business relations which had not occurred to you.”

“And there is no other way?”

Another way had dawned on Reuben’s mind, but it was so bold and precipitous that he hesitated to consider it seriously at first. When it did take form and force itself upon him, he said, half quaking at his own audacity:

“No other way—while—he remains my partner.” Bright women discover many obscure things by the use of that marvellous faculty we call intuition, but they have by no means reduced its employment to an exact science. Sometimes their failure to discover more obvious things is equally remarkable. At this moment, for example, Kate’s feminine wits did not in the least help her to read the mind of the man before her, or the meaning in his words. In truth, they misled her, for she heard only an obstinate reiteration of an unpleasant statement, and set her teeth together with impatience as she heard it.

And had she even kept these teeth tight clinched, and said nothing, the man might have gone on in self-explanation, and made clear to her her mistake. But her vexation was too imperative for silence.

“I am very sorry to have taken up your time, Mr. Tracy,” she said, stiffly, and rose from her chair. “I am so little informed about these matters, I really imagined you could help us. Pray forgive me.”

If Reuben could have realized, as he stood in momentary embarrassment, that this beautiful lady before him had fairly bitten her tongue to restrain it from adding that he might treat this as a professional call, or in some other way suggesting that he would be paid for his time, he might have been more embarrassed still, and angry as well.

But it did not occur to him to feel annoyance—at least, toward her. He really was sorry that no way of being of help to her seemed immediately available, and he thought of this more in fact than he did of the personal aspects of his failure to justify her invitation. He noted that the faint perfume which her dress exhaled as she rose was identical with that of the letter of invitation, and thought to himself that he would preserve that letter, and then that it would not be quite warranted by the circumstances, and so found himself standing silent before her, sorely reluctant to go away, and conscious that there must be a sympathetic light in his eyes which hers did not reflect.

“I am truly grieved if you are disappointed,” he managed to say at last.

“Oh, it is nothing, Mr. Tracy,” she said, politely, and moved toward the door. “It was my ignorance of business rules. I am so sorry to have troubled you.”

Reuben followed her through the hall to the outer door, wondering if she would offer to shake hands with him, and putting both his stick and hat in his left hand to free the other in case she did.

On the doorstep she did give him her hand, and in that moment, ruled by a flash of impulse, he heard himself saying to her:

“If anything happens, if you learn anything, if you need me, you won’t fail to call me, will you?”

Then the door closed, and as Reuben walked away he did not seem able to recall whether she had answered his appeal or not. In sober fact, it had scarcely sounded like his appeal at all. The voice was certainly one which had never been heard in the law-office down on Main Street or in the trial-chamber of the Dearborn County Court-House over the way. It had sounded more like the voice of an actor in the theatre—like a Romeo murmuring up to the sweet girl in the balcony.

Reuben walked straight to his office, and straight through to the little inner apartment appropriated to his private uses. There were some people in the large room talking with his partner, but he scarcely observed their presence as he passed. He unlocked a tiny drawer in the top of his desk, cleared out its contents brusquely, dusted the inside with his hand kerchief, and then placed within it a perfumed note which he took from his pocket.

When he had turned the key upon this souvenir, he drew a long breath, lighted a cigar, and sat down, with his feet on the table and his thoughts among the stars.