This guarded reference to the fact that Mrs. Minster had secured an admirable servant who was a nuisance at small feminine dinner-parties sufficed to dismiss the subject. Miss Tabitha assumed on the moment a more confidential manner and tone: “I wonder if you’ve heard,” she said, “that young Horace Boyce has come back. Why, now I think of it, he must have come up in your train.” “He was in our car,” replied Mrs. Minster. “He sat by us, and talked all the way up. I never heard a man’s tongue run on so in all my born days.” “He takes that from his grandmother Beekman,” explained Miss Tabitha, by way of parenthesis. “She was something dreadful: talking ‘thirteen to the dozen’ doesn’t begin to express it. You don’t remember her. She went down to New York when I was a mere slip of a girl, to have a set of false teeth fitted--they were a novelty in those days--and it was winter time, and she wouldn’t listen to the dentist’s advice to keep her mouth shut, and she caught cold, and it turned into lockjaw, and that was the last of her. It was just after her daughter Julia had been married to young Sylvanus Boyce. Dear me, how time flies! I can remember her old bombazine gown and her black Spanish mits, and her lace cap on one side of her head, as if it were only yesterday. And here Julia’s been dead twenty years and more, and her grown-up son’s come home from Europe, and the General--” The old maid stopped short, because her sentence could not be charitably finished. “How did _you_ like Horace?” she asked, to shift the subject, and looking at Kate Minster. The tall, dark girl with the rich complexion and the beautiful, proud eyes glanced up at her questioner impatiently, as if disposed to resent the inquiry. Then she seemed to reflect that no offence could possibly have been intended, for she answered pleasantly enough: “He seemed an amiable sort of person; and I should judge he was clever, too. He always was a smart boy--I think that is the phrase. He talked to mamma most of the time.” “How can you say that, Kate? I’m sure it was because you scarcely answered him at all, and read your book--which was not very polite.” “I was afraid to venture upon anything more than monosyllables with him,” said Kate, “or I should have been ruder still. I should have had to tell him that I did not like Americans who made the accident of their having been to Europe an excuse for sneering at those who haven’t been there, and that would have been highly impolite, wouldn’t it?” “I don’t think he sneered,” replied Mrs. Minster. “I thought he tried to be as affable and interesting as he knew how. Pray what did he say that was sneering?”