You see, Payson Clifford, having been sent to a decent school and a decent college, irrespective of whether his father was a rotter or not, had imbibed something of a sense of honor.  Struggle as he would against it, the shadow of Sadie Burch kept creeping athwart his mind.  There were so many possibilities!  Suppose she was in desperate straits?  Hadn’t he better look her up, anyhow?  No, he most definitely didn’t want to know anything about her!  Supposing she really had rendered some service to his father for which she ought to be repaid as he had sought to repay her?  These thoughts obtruded themselves upon Payson’s attention when he least desired it, but they did not cause him to alter his intention to get his hooks into his father’s whole residuary estate and keep it for himself.  He had, you observe, a conscience, but it couldn’t stand up against twenty-five thousand dollars reinforced by perfectly sound legal arguments.

No, he had a good excuse for not being a gentleman and a sportsman and he did not purpose to look for any reasons for doing differently.  Then unexpectedly he was invited to dinner by Mr. Ephraim Tutt in a funny old ramshackle house on West Twenty-third Street with ornamented iron piazza railings all covered with the withered stalks of long dead wistarias, and something happened to him.  “Payson Clifford’s Twenty-five Thousand Dollar Dinner.”  He had no suspicion, of course, what was coming to him when he went there,—­went, merely because Mr. Tutt was one of the very few friends of his father that he knew.  And he held towards the old lawyer rather the same sort of patronizing attitude that he had had towards the old man.  It would be a rotten dinner probably followed by a deadly dull evening with a snuffy old fossil who would tell him long-winded, rambling anecdotes of what New York had been like when there were wild goats in Central Park.

The snuffy old fossil, however, made no reference whatever to either old New York or wild goats,—­the nearest he came to it being wild oats.  Instead he began the dreary evening by opening a cupboard on his library wall and disclosing three long bottles, from which he partially filled a shining silver receptacle containing cracked ice.  This he shook with astonishing skill and vigor, meantime uttering loud outcries of “Miranda!  Fetch up the mint!” Then a buxom colored lady in calico—­with a grin like that which made Aunt Sallie famous—­having appeared, panting, with two large glasses and a bundle of green herbage upon a silver salver, the old fossil poured out a seething decoction—­of which like only the memory remains—­performed an incantation over each glass with the odoriferous greens, smiled fondly upon the work of his hands and remarked with amiable hospitality, “Well, my son!  Glad to see you!—­Here’s how!”