Everything? The word seemed feeble. It meant one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen as his wife--a lady well-born, delicately nurtured, clever, and good; it meant vast wealth, untold wealth, with which to be not only the principal personage of these provincial parts, but a great figure in New York or Washington or Europe. He might be senator in Congress, minister to Paris, or even aspire to the towering, solitary eminence of the Presidency itself with the backing of these millions. It meant a yacht, the very dream of sea-going luxury and speed, in which to bask under Hawaiian skies, to loiter lazily along the topaz shores of far Cathay, to flit to and fro between spice lands and cold northern seas, the whole watery globe subject to her keel. Why, there could be a castle on the Moselle, a country house in Devonshire, a flat in Paris, a villa at Mentone, a summer island home on the St. Lawrence, a mansion in New York--all together, if he liked, or as many as pleased his whim. It might be worth the while to lease a shooting in Scotland, only the mischief was that badly bred Americans, the odious _nouveaux riches_, had rather discredited the national name in the Highlands. So the young man’s fancies floated on the wreaths of scented smoke till at last he yawned in spite of himself, sated with the contemplation of the gifts the gods had brought him. He read Mrs. Minster’s note once again before he went to bed, and sleep overtook his brain while it was still pleasantly musing on the choicest methods of expending the income of her millions. Curiously enough, during all these hours of happy castle-building, the question of why Schuyler Tenney had interested himself in the young man’s fortunes never once crossed that young man’s mind. To be frank, the pictures he painted were all of “gentlemen” and “ladies,” and his father’s partner, though his help might be of great assistance at the outset, could scarcely expect to mingle in such company, even in Horace’s tobacco reveries. Neither to his father at the breakfast-table, nor to Reuben Tracy at the office, did young Mr. Boyce next day mention the fact that he was to call on Mrs. Minster. This enforced silence was not much to his liking, primarily because his temperament was the reverse of secretive. When he had done anything or thought of doing something, the impulse to tell about it was always strong upon him. The fact that the desire to talk was not rigorously balanced by regard for the exact and prosaic truth may not have been an essential part of the trait when we come to analysis, but garrulity and exaggeration ran together in Horace’s nature. To repress them now, just at the time when the most important event of his life impended, required a good deal of effort.