“What I don’t understand in all this,” he said, hurriedly--“for that matter the whole thing is a mystery--but what I particularly fail to see is your object in benefiting me. The two things don’t hitch. You tell me that you have got my father in a hole, and then you offer me a great and substantial prize. I don’t catch the sequence. You are not the man to do things for nothing. What you haven’t told me is what there is in this affair for you.” Mr. Tenney seemed complimented by this tribute to his commercial sense and single-mindedness. “No, I haven’t told you,” he said, buttoning his coat. “That’ll come in due time. All you’ve got to do meanwhile is to keep still, and to take the thing when it comes to you. Let me know at once, and say nothing to any living soul--least of all Tracy--until you’ve talked with me. That oughtn’t to be hard.” “And suppose I don’t like the conditions?” “Then you may lump them,” said Schuyler Ten, ney, disclosing his small teeth again in a half-smile, as he made his way out. CHAPTER XI.--MRS. MINSTER’S NEW LEGAL ADVISER. Some two weeks later Mr. Horace Boyce, on returning home one evening, found on his table a note which had been delivered during the day by a servant. It was from Mrs. Minster--“Desideria Minster” she signed herself--asking him to call upon her the following afternoon. The young man read the missive over and over again by the lamplight, and if it had been a love-letter from the daughter instead of the polite business appointment by the mother, his eyes couldn’t have flashed more eagerly as he took in the meaning of its words. The meaning of its words! He thought long upon that, ruminating in his easy-chair before the fire until far past midnight, until the dainty little Japanese saucer at his side was heaped up with cigar ashes, and the air was heavy with smoke. Evidently this summons was directly connected with the remarks made by Tenney a fortnight before. He had said the Minster business should come to him, and here it was. The fact that Mrs. Minster wrote to him at his residence, rather than at his office, was proof that she too wished to have him alone, and not the firm of Tracy & Boyce, as her adviser. That there should be this prejudice against Reuben, momentarily disturbed the young man; but, upon examination, he found it easy to account for it. Reuben was very nice--his partner even paused for a moment to reflect how decent a fellow Reuben really was--but then, he scarcely belonged to the class of society in which people like the Boyces and Minsters moved. Naturally the millionnaire widow, belonging as she did to an ancient family in the Hudson River valley, and bearing the queer name of a grandmother who had been a colonial beauty, would prefer to have as her family lawyer somebody who also had ancestors.