“Of course you’ve heard of the club they’re going to start, or have started; they call it the Thessaly Citizens’ Club.” “Who? the Bidwells?” “Oh, dear, no! The young men of the village--or I suppose it will soon be a city now. They tell all sorts of stories about what this club is going to do; reform the whole town, if you believe them. I always understood a club was for men to drink and play cards and sit up to all hours in, but it seems this is to be different. At any rate, several clergymen, Dr. Turner among them, have joined it, and Horace Boyce was elected president.” The sparrows had disappeared, but Kate made no answer, and musingly kept her eyes fastened on the snow where the disagreeable birds had been. “Now, _there’s_ a young man,” said Miss Tabitha, after a pause. Still no comment came from the window, and so the elder maiden drifted forward: “It’s all Horace Boyce now. You don’t hear anything else. Everybody is saying he will soon be our leading man. They tell me that he speaks beautifully--in public, I mean--and he is so good-looking and so bright; they all expect he’ll make quite a mark when court sits next month. I suppose hell throw his partner altogether into the shade; everybody at least seems to think so. And Reuben Tracy had _such_ a chance--once.” The tall, dark girl at the window still did not turn, but she took up the conversation with an accent of interest. “_Had_ a chance--what do you mean? I’ve never heard a word against him, except that idle story you told here once.” “Idle or not, Kate, you can’t deny that the girl is here.” Kate laughed, in scornful amusement. “No; and so winter is here, and you are here, and the snowbirds are here, and all the rest of it. But what does that go to show?” “And that reminds me,” exclaimed Tabitha, leaning forward in her chair with added eagerness--“now, what _do_ you think?” “The processes by which you are reminded of things, Tabitha, are not fit subjects for light and frivolous brains like mine.” “You laugh; but you really never _could_ guess it in all your born days. That Lawton girl--she’s actually a tenant of mine; or, that is, she rented from another party, but she’s in _my house!_ You can just fancy what a state I was in when I heard of it.” “How do you mean? What house?” “You know those places of mine on Bridge Street--rickety old houses they’re getting to be now, though I must say they’ve stood much better than some built years and years after my father put them up, for he was the most thorough man about such things you ever saw, and as old Major Schoonmaker once said of him, he--” “Yes, but what about that--that girl?” Tabitha returned to her subject without impatience. All her life she had been accustomed to being pulled up and warned from rambling, and if her hearers neglected to do this the responsibility for the omission was their own.