REUBEN Tracy waited in his office next day for the visit of the milliner, but, to tell the truth, devoted very little thought to wondering about her errand.

The whole summer and autumn, as he sat now and smoked in meditation upon them, seemed to have been an utterly wasted period in his life. He had done nothing worth recalling. His mind had not even evolved good ideas. Through all the interval which lay between this November day and that afternoon in March, when he had been for the only time inside the Minster house, one solitary set thought had possessed his mind. Long ago it had formulated itself in his brain; found its way to the silent, spiritual tongue with which we speak to ourselves. He loved Kate Minster, and had had room for no other feeling all these months.

At first, when this thought was still new to him, he had hugged it to his heart with delight. Now the melancholy days indeed were come, and he had only suffering and disquiet from it. She had never even answered his letter proffering assistance. She was as far away from him, as coldly unattainable, as the north star. It made him wretched to muse upon her beauty and charm; his heart was weary with hopeless longing for her friendship—yet he was powerless to command either mind or heart. They clung to her with painful persistency; they kept her image before him, whispered her name in his ear, filled all his dreams with her fair presence, to make each wakening a fresh grief.

In his revolt against this weakness, Reuben had burned the little scented note for which so reverential a treasure-box had been made in his desk. But this was of no avail. He could never enter that small inner room where he now sat without glancing at the drawer which had once been consecrated to the letter.

It was humiliating that he should prove to have so little sense and strength. He bit his cigar fiercely with annoyance when this aspect of the case rose before him. If love meant anything, it meant a mutual sentiment. By all the lights of philosophy, it was not possible to love a person who did not return that love. This he said to himself over and over again, but the argument was not helpful. Still his mind remained perversely full of Kate Minster.

During all this time he had taken no step to probe the business which had formed the topic of that single disagreeable talk with his partner in the preceding March. Miss Minster’s failure to answer his letter had deeply wounded his pride, and had put it out of the question that he should seem to meddle in her affairs. He had never mentioned the subject again to Horace. The two young men had gone through the summer and autumn under the same office roof, engaged very often upon the same business, but with mutual formality and personal reserve. No controversy had arisen between them, but Reuben was conscious now that they had ceased to be friends, as men understand the term, for a long time.

For his own part, his dislike for his partner had grown so deep and strong that he felt doubly bound to guard himself against showing it. It was apparent to the most superficial introspection that a good deal of his aversion to Horace arose from the fact that he was on friendly terms with the Minsters, and could see Miss Kate every day. He never looked at his partner without remembering this, and extracting unhappiness from the thought. But he realized that this was all the more reason why he should not yield to his feelings. Both his pride and his sense of fairness restrained him from quarrelling with Horace on grounds of that sort.

But the events of the last day or two had opened afresh the former dilemma about a rupture over the Minster works business. Since Schuyler Tenney had blossomed forth as the visible head of the rolling-mills, Reuben had, in spite of his pique and of his resolution not to be betrayed into meddling, kept a close watch upon events connected with the two great iron manufacturing establishments. He had practically learned next to nothing, but he was none the less convinced that a swindle underlay what was going on.

It was with this same conviction that he now strove to understand the shutting-down of the furnaces and ore-fields owned by the Minsters, and the threatened lockout in the Thessaly Manufacturing Company’s mills. But it was very difficult to see where dishonesty could come in. The furnaces and ore-supply had been stopped by an order of the pig-iron trust, but of course the owners would be amply compensated for that. The other company’s resolve to reduce wages meant, equally of course, a desire to make up on the pay-list the loss entailed by the closing of the furnaces, which compelled it to secure its raw material elsewhere. Taken by themselves, each transaction was intelligible. But considered together, and as both advised by the same men, they seemed strangely in conflict. What possible reason could the Thessaly Company, for example, have for urging Mrs. Minster to enter a trust, the chief purpose of which was to raise the price of pig-iron which they themselves bought almost entirely? The problem puzzled Reuben. He racked his brain in futile search for the missing clew to this financial paradox. Evidently there was such a clew somewhere; an initial fact which would explain the whole mystery, if only it could be got at. He had for his own satisfaction collected some figures about the Minster business, partly exact, partly estimated, and he had worked laboriously over these in the effort to discover the false quantity which he felt sure was somewhere concealed. But thus far his work had been in vain.

Just now a strange idea for the moment fascinated his inclination. It was nothing else than the thought of putting his pride in his pocket—of going to Miss Minster and saying frankly: “I believe you are being robbed. In Heaven’s name, give me a chance to find out, and to protect you if I am right! I shall ask no reward. I shall not even ask ever to see you again, once the rescue is achieved. But oh! do not send me away until then—I pray you that!”

While the wild project urged itself upon his mind the man himself seemed able to stand apart and watch this battle of his own thoughts and longings, like an outside observer. He realized that the passion he had nursed so long in silence had affected his mental balance. He was conscious of surprise, almost of a hysterical kind of amusement, that Reuben Tracy should be so altered as to think twice about such a proceeding. Then he fell to deploring and angrily reviling the change that had come over him; and lo! all at once he found himself strangely glad of the change, and was stretching forth his arms in a fantasy of yearning toward a dream figure in creamy-white robes, girdled with a silken cord, and was crying out in his soul, “I love you!”

The vision faded away in an instant as there came the sound of rapping at the outer door. Reuben rose to his feet, his brain still bewildered by the sun-like brilliancy of the picture which had been burned into it, and confusedly collected his thoughts as he walked across the larger room. His partner had been out of town some days, and he had sent the office-boy home, in order that the Lawton girl might be able to talk in freedom. The knocking; was that of a woman’s hand. Evidently it was Jessica, who had come an hour or so earlier than she had appointed. He wondered vaguely what her errand might be, as he opened the door.

In the dingy hallway stood two figures instead of one, both thickly clad and half veiled. The waning light of late afternoon did not enable him to recognize his visitors with any certainty. The smaller lady of the two might be Jessica—the the who stood farthest away. He had almost resolved that it was, in this moment of mental dubiety, when the other, putting out her gloved hand, said to him:

“I am afraid you don’t remember me, it is so long since we met. This is my sister, Mr. Tracy—Miss Ethel Minster.”

The door-knob creaked in Reuben’s hand as he pressed upon it for support, and there were eccentric flashes of light before his eyes.

“Oh, I am so glad!” was what he said. “Do come in—do come in.” He led the way into the office with a dazed sense of heading a triumphal procession, and then stopped in the centre of the room, suddenly remembering that he had not shaken hands. Was it too late now? To give himself time to think, he lighted the gas in both offices and closed all the shutters.

“Oh, I am so glad!” he repeated, as he turned to the two ladies. The radiant smile on his face bore out his words. “I am afraid the little room—my own place—is full of cigar-smoke. Let me see about the fire here.” He shook the grate vehemently, and poked down the coals through one of the upper windows. “Perhaps it will be warm enough here. Let me bring some chairs.” He bustled into the inner room, and pushed out his own revolving desk-chair, and drew up two others from different ends of the office. The easiest chair of all, which was at Horace’s table, he did not touch. Then, when his two visitors had taken seats, he beamed down upon them once more, and said for the third time:

“I really am delighted!”

Miss Kate put up her short veil with a frank gesture. The unaffected pleasure which shone in Reuben’s face and radiated from his manner was something more exuberant than she had expected, but it was grateful to her, and she and her sister both smiled in response.

“I have an apology to make first of all, Mr. Tracy,” she said, and her voice was the music of the seraphim to his senses. “I don’t think—I am afraid I never answered your kind letter last spring. It is a bad habit of mine; I am the worst correspondent in the world. And then we went away so soon afterward.”

“I beg that you won’t mention it,” said Reuben; and indeed it seemed to him to be a trivial thing now—not worth a thought, much less a word. He had taken a chair also, and was at once intoxicated with the rapture of looking Kate in the face thus again, and nervous lest the room was not warm enough.

“Won’t you loosen your wraps?” he asked, with solicitude. “I am afraid you won’t feel them when you go out.” It was an old formula which he had heard his mother use with callers at the farm, but which he himself had never uttered before in his life. But then he had never before been pervaded with such a tender anxiety for the small comforts of visitors.

Miss Kate opened the throat of her fur coat. “We sha’n’t stay long,” she said. “We must be home to dinner.” She paused for a moment and then asked: “Is there any likelihood of our seeing your partner, Mr. Boyce, here to-day?”

Reuben’s face fell on the instant. Alas, poor fool, he thought, to imagine there were angels’ visits for you!

“No,” he answered, gloomily. “I am afraid not. He is out of town.”

“Oh, we didn’t want to see him,” put in Miss Ethel. “Quite the contrary.”

Reuben’s countenance recovered all its luminous radiance. He stole a glance at this younger girl’s face, and felt that he almost loved her too.

“No,” Miss Kate went on, “in fact, we took the opportunity of his being away to come and try to see you alone. We are dreadfully anxious, Mr. Tracy, about the way things are going on.”

The lawyer could not restrain a comprehending nod of the head, but he did not speak.

“We do not understand at all what is being done,” proceeded Kate. “There is nobody to explain things to us except the men who are doing those things, and it seems to us that they tell us just what they like. We maybe doing them an injustice, but we are very nervous about a good many matters. That is why we came to you.”

Reuben bowed again. There was an instant’s pause, and then he opened one of the little mica doors in the stove. “I’m afraid this isn’t going to burn up,” he said. “If you don’t mind smoke, the other room is much warmer.”

It was not until he had safely bestowed his precious visitors in the cosier room, and persuaded them to loosen all their furs, that his mind was really at ease. “Now,” he remarked, with a smile of relief, “now go ahead. Tell me everything.”

“We have this difficulty,” said Kate, hesitatingly; “when I spoke to you before, you felt that you couldn’t act in the matter, or learn things, or advise us, on account of the partnership. And as that still exists—why—” She broke off with an inquiring sigh.

“My dear Miss Minster,” Reuben answered, in a voice so firm and full of force that it bore away in front of it all possibility of suspecting that he was too bold, “when I left you I wanted to tell you, when I wrote to you I tried to have you understand, that if there arose a question of honestly helping you, of protecting you, and the partnership stood between me and that act of honorable service, I would crush the partnership like an eggshell, and put all my powers at your disposal. But I am afraid you did not understand.”

The two girls looked at each other, and then at the strong face before them, with the focussed light of the argand burner upon it.

“No,” said Kate, “I am afraid we didn’t.”

“And so I say to you now,” pursued Reuben, with a sense of exultation in the resolute words as they sounded on his ear, “I will not allow any professional chimeras to bind me to inactivity, to acquiescence, if a wrong is being done to you. And more, I will do all that lies in my power to help you understand the whole situation. And if, when it is all mapped out before us, you need my assistance to set crooked things straight, why, with all my heart you shall have it, and the partnership shall go out of the window.”

“If you had said that at the beginning,” sighed Kate.

“Ah, then I did not know what I know now!” answered Reuben, holding her eyes with his, while the light on his face grew ruddier.

“Well, then, this is what I can tell you,” said the elder girl, “and I am to tell it to you as our lawyer, am I not—our lawyer in the sense that Mr. Boyce is mamma’s lawyer?”

Reuben bowed, and settled himself in his chair to listen. It was a long recital, broken now by suggestions from Ethel, now by questions from the lawyer. From time to time he made notes on the blotter before him, and when the narrative was finished he spent some moments in consulting these, and combining them with figures from another paper, in new columns. Then he said, speaking slowly and with deliberation:

“This I take to be the situation: You are millionnaires, and are in a strait for money. When I say ‘you’ I speak of your mother and yourselves as one. Your income, which formerly gave you a surplus of sixty thousand or seventy thousand dollars a year for new investments, is all at once not large enough to pay the interest on your debts, let alone your household and personal expenses. First, what has become of this income? It came from three sources—the furnaces, the telegraph stock, and a group of minor properties. These furnaces and iron-mines, which were all your own until you were persuaded to put a mortgage on them, have been closed by the orders of outsiders with whom you were persuaded to combine. Exit your income from that source. Telegraph competition has cut down your earnings from the Northern Union stock to next to nothing. No doubt we shall find that your income from the other properties has been absorbed in salaries voted to themselves by the men into whose hands you have fallen. That is a very old trick, and I shall be surprised if it does not turn up here. In the second place, you are heavily in debt. On the 1st of January next, you must borrow money, apparently, to pay the interest on this debt. What makes it the harder is that you have not, as far as I can discover, had any value received whatever for this debt. In other words, you are being swindled out of something like one hundred thousand dollars per year, and not even such a property as your father left can stand that very long. I should say it was high time you came to somebody for advice.”

Before this terribly lucid statement the two girls sat aghast.

It was Ethel who first found something to say. “We never dreamed of this, Mr. Tracy,” she said, breathlessly. “Our idea in coming, what we thought of most, was the poor people being thrown out of work in the winter, like this, and it being in some way, our fault!”

“People think it is our fault,” interposed Kate. “Only to-day, as we were driving here, there were some men standing on the corner, and one of them called out a very cruel thing about us, as if we had personally injured him. But what you tell me—is it really as bad as that?”

“I am afraid it is quite as bad as I have pictured it.”

“And what is to be done? There must be some way to stop it,” said Kate.

“You will put these men in prison the first thing, won’t you, Mr. Tracy?” asked Ethel. “And oh, I forgot! Who are the men who are robbing us?”

Reuben smiled gravely, and ignored the latter question. “There are a good many first things to do,” he said. “I must think it all over very carefully before any step is taken. But the very beginning will be, I think, for you both to revoke the power of attorney your mother holds for you, and to obtain a statement of her management of the trusteeship over your property.”

“She will refuse it plump! You don’t know mamma,” said Ethel.

“She couldn’t refuse if the demand were made regularly, could she, Mr. Tracy?” asked Kate. He shook his head, and she went on: “But it seems dreadful not to act with mamma in the matter. Just think what a situation it will be, to bring our lawyer up to fight her lawyer! It sounds unnatural, doesn’t it? Don’t you think, Mr. Tracy, if you were to speak to her now—”

“No, that could hardly be, unless she asked me,” returned the lawyer.

“Well, then, if I told her all you said, or you wrote it out for me to show her.”

“No, nor that either,” said Reuben. “To speak frankly, Miss Minster, your mother is perhaps the most difficult and dangerous element in the whole problem. I hope you won’t be offended—but that any woman in her senses could have done what she seems to have done, is almost incredible.”

“Poor mamma!” commented Ethel. “She never would listen to advice.”

“Unfortunately, that is just what she has done,” broke in Kate. “Mr. Tracy, tell me candidly, is it possible that the man who advised her to do these things—or rather the two men, both lawyers, who advised her—could have done so honestly?”

“I should say it was impossible,” answered Reuben, after a pause.

Again the two girls exchanged glances, and then Kate, looking at her watch, rose to her feet. “We are already late, Mr. Tracy,” she said, offering him her hand, and unconsciously allowing him to hold it in his own as she went on: “We are both deeply indebted to you. We want you—oh, so much!—to help us. We will do everything you say; we will put ourselves completely in your hands, won’t we, Ethel?”

The younger sister said “Yes, indeed!” and then smiled as she furtively glanced up into Kate’s face and thence downward to her hand. Kate herself with a flush and murmur of confusion withdrew the fingers which the lawyer still held.

“Then you must begin,” he said, not striving very hard to conceal the delight he had had from that stolen custody of the gloved hand, “by resolving not to say a word to anybody—least of all to your mother—about having consulted me. You must realize that we have to deal with criminals—it is a harsh word, I know, but there can be no other—and that to give them warning before our plans are laid would be a folly almost amounting to crime itself. If I may, Miss Kate”—there was a little gulp in his throat as he safely passed this perilous first use of the familiar name—“I will write to you to-morrow, outlining my suggestions in detail, telling you what to do, perhaps something of what I am going to do, and naming a time—subject, of course, to your convenience—when we would better meet again.”

Thus, after some further words on the same lines, the interview ended. Reuben went to the door with them, and would have descended to the street to bear them company, but they begged him not to expose himself to the cold, and so, with gracious adieus, left him in his office and went down, the narrow, unlighted staircase, picking their way.

On the landing, where some faint reflection of the starlight and gas-light outside filtered through the musty atmosphere, Kate paused a moment to gather the weaker form of her sister protectingly close to her.

“Are you utterly tired out, pet?” she asked. “I’m afraid it’s been too much for you.”

“Oh, no,” said Ethel. “Only—yes, I am tired of one thing—of your slowness of perception. Why, child alive, Mr. Tracy has been just burning to take up our cause ever since he first saw you. You thought he was indifferent, and all the while he was over head and ears in love with you! I watched him every moment, and it was written all over his face; and you never saw it!”

The answering voice fell with a caressing imitation of reproof upon the darkness: “You silly puss, you think everybody is in love with me!” it said.

Then the two young ladies, furred and tippeted, emerged upon the sidewalk, stepped into their carriage, and were whirled off homeward under the starlight.

A few seconds later, two other figures, a woman and a child, also emerged from this same stairway, and, there being no coachman in waiting for them, started on foot down the street. The woman was Jessica Lawton, and she walked wearily with drooping head and shoulders, never once looking at the little boy whose hand she held, and who followed her in wondering patience.

She had stood in the stairway, drawn up against the wall to let these descending ladies pass. She had heard all they said, and had on the instant recognized Kate Minster’s voice. For a moment, in this darkness suddenly illumined by Ethel’s words, she had reflected. Then she, too, had turned and come down the stairs again. It seemed best, under these new circumstances, not to see Reuben Tracy just now. And as she slowly walked home, she almost forgot the existence of the little boy, so deeply was her mind engaged with what she had heard.

As for Reuben, the roseate dreams had all come back. From the drear mournfulness of chill November his heart had leaped, by a fairy transition, straight into the bowers of June, where birds sang and fountains plashed, and beauty and happiness were the only law. It would be time enough to-morrow to think about this great struggle with cunning scoundrels for the rescue of a princely fortune, which opened before him. This evening his mind should dwell upon nothing but thoughts of her!

And so it happened that an hour later, when he decided to lock up the office and go over to supper, he had never once remembered that the Lawton girl’s appointment remained unkept.