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.”