“Oh, leave that to me!” said Horace, with ardent confidence. Then, after this rapturous outburst, he went on more quietly: “I would beg of you not to mention the subject to her. I think that would be best. Your favor has allowed me to come and go here on pleasant terms of friendship. Let these terms not be altered. I will not ask your daughter to commit herself until she has had time and chance to know me through and through. It would not be fair to her otherwise. To pick a husband is the one grand, irrevocable step in a young girl’s life. Its success means bliss, content, sunshine; its failure means all that is the reverse. Therefore, I say, she cannot have too much information, too many advantages, to help her in her choice.” Thus it came to be understood that Mrs. Minster was to say nothing, and was not to seem to make more of Horace than she had previously done. Then he bowed over her hand and lightly kissed it, in a fashion which the good lady fondly assumed to be European, and was gone. Mrs. Minster spent the rest of the afternoon and evening in a semi-dazed abstraction of mental power, from time to time fitfully remembering some wealthy young man whom she had vaguely considered as a possible son-in-law, and sighing impartially over each mustached and shirt-fronted figure as she pushed it out into the limbo of the might-have-been. She almost groaned once when she recalled that this secret must be kept even from her friend Tabitha. As for Horace, he walked on air. The marvel of his great success surrounded and lifted him, as angels bear the souls of the blessed fleeting from earth in the artist’s dream. The young Bonaparte, home from Italy and the reproduction of Hannibal’s storied feat, with Paris on its knees before him and France resounding with his name, could not have swung his shoulders more proudly, or gazed upon unfolding destiny with a more exultant confidence. On his way homeward an instinctive desire to be alone with his joy led him to choose unfrequented streets, and on one of these he passed a milliner’s shop which he had never seen before. He would not have noted it now, save that his eye was unconsciously caught by some stray freak of color in the window where bonnets were displayed. Then, still unconsciously, his vision embraced the glass door beside this window, and there suddenly it was arrested and turned to a bewildered stare. In the dusk of the little shop nothing could be distinguished but two figures which stood close by the door. The dying light from the western sky, ruddily brilliant and penetrating in its final glow, fell full upon the faces of these two as they were framed in profile by the door. One was the face of Kate Minster, the woman he was to wed. The other was the face of Jessica Law-ton, the woman whose life he had despoiled.