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.