“My dear young lady,” broke in Reuben, “you have no earthly idea of the cruelty and meanness of what he did by saying that to you. I can’t--or yes, why shouldn’t I? The fact is that that poor girl--and when she was at my school she was as honest and good and clever a child as I ever saw in my life--owed her whole misery and wretchedness to Horace Boyce. I never dreamed of it, either at the time or later; in fact, until the very day I met you at the milliner’s shop. Somehow I mentioned that he was my partner, and then she told me. And then, knowing that, I had to sit still all summer and see him coming here every day, on intimate terms with you and your sister and mother.” Reuben stopped himself with the timely recollection that this was an unauthorized emotion, and added hurriedly: “But I never could have imagined such baseness, to deliberately slander her to you!” Kate did not at once reply, and when she did speak it was to turn the talk away from Horace Boyce. “I will go and see her to-morrow,” she said. “I am very glad to hear you say that,” was Reuben’s comment. “It is like you to say it,” he went on, with brightening eyes. “It is a benediction to be the friend of a young woman like you, who has no impulses that are not generous, and whose only notion of power is to help others.” “I shall not like you if you begin to flatter,” she replied, with mock austerity, and an answering light in her eyes. “I am really a very perverse and wrong-headed girl, distinguished only for having never done any good at all. And anybody who says otherwise is not a friend, but a flatterer, and I am weary of false tongues.” Miss Ethel came in while Reuben was still turning over in his mind the unexpressed meanings of these words, and with her entrance the talk became general once more. The lawyer described to the two sisters the legal steps he had taken, and their respective significance, and then spoke of his intention to make a criminal complaint as soon as some additional proof, now being sought, should come to hand. Ethel clapped her hands. “And Horace Boyce will go to prison, then?” she asked, eagerly. “There is a strong case against him,” answered Reuben. The graveness of his tone affected the girl’s spirits, and led her to say in an altered voice: “I don’t want to be unkind, and I daresay I shall be silly enough to cry in private if the thing really happens; but when I think of the trouble and wickedness he has been responsible for, and of the far more terrible mischief he might have wrought in this family if I--that is, if we had not come to you as we did, I simply _hate_ him.” “Don’t let us talk about him any more, puss,” said Kate, soberly, rising as she spoke. CHAPTER XXX.--JESSICA’S GREAT DESPAIR. It was on the following day that a less important member of society than Miss Minster resolved to also pay a visit to the milliner’s shop.