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.