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 o............