Horace realized nothing else so swiftly as that he had not been seen, and, with an instinctive lowering of the head and a quickened step, he passed on. It was not until he had got out of the street altogether that he breathed a long breath and was able to think. Then he found himself trembling with excitement, as if he had been through a battle or a burning house. Reflection soon helped his nerves to quietude again. Evidently the girl had opened a millinery shop, and evidently Miss Minster was buying a bonnet of her. That was all there was of it, and surely there was no earthly cause for perturbation in that. The young man had thought so lightly of the Law-ton incident at Thanksgiving time that it had never since occurred to him to ask Tracy about its sequel. It came to his mind now that Tracy had probably helped her to start the shop. “Damn Tracy!” he said to himself. No, there was nothing to be uneasy about in the casual, commercial meeting of these two women. He became quite clear on this point as he strode along toward home. At his next meeting with Kate it might do no harm to mention having seen her there in passing, and to drop a hint as to the character of the girl whom she was dealing with. He would see how the talk shaped itself, after the Law-ton woman’s name had been mentioned. It was a great nuisance, her coming to Thessaly, anyway. He didn’t wish her any special harm, but if she got in his way here she should be crushed like an insect. But, pshaw! it was silly to conceive injury or embarrassment coming from her. So with a laugh he dismissed the subject from his thoughts, and went home to dine with his father, and gladdened the General’s heart by a more or less elaborated account of the day’s momentous event, in complete forgetfulness of the shock he had had. In the dead of the night, however, he did think of it again with a vengeance. He awoke screaming, and cold with frightened quakings, under the spell of some hideous nightmare. When he thought upon them, the terrors of his dream were purely fantastic and could not be shaped into any kind of coherent form. But the profile of the Lawton girl seemed to be a part of all these terrors, a twisted and elongated side-face, with staring, empty eyes and lips down-drawn like those of the Medusa’s head, and yet, strangely enough, with a certain shifting effect of beauty upon it all under the warm light of a winter sunset. Horace lay a long time awake, deliberately striving to exorcise this repellent countenance by fixing his thoughts upon the other face--the strong, beautiful, queenly face of the girl who was to be his wife. But he could not bring up before his mind’s eye this picture that he wanted, and he could not drive the other away.