If for the next hour or two there was anything to be done at MacFarlane’s, Peter was ready to do it, but this accomplished, he would shoulder his bag and camp out for the night beside the boy’s bed.  He had come, indeed, to tell Felicia so, and he meant to sleep there whatever her protests.  He was preparing himself for her objections, when she reentered the room.

“How is young Breen?” Miss Felicia asked in a whisper, closing the door behind her.  She had put Ruth to bed, where she had again given way to an uncontrollable fit of weeping.

“Pretty weak.  The doctor is with him now.”

“What did the fool get up for?” She did not mean to surrender too quickly about Jack despite his heroism—­not to Peter, at any rate.  Then, again, she half suspected that Ruth’s tears were equally divided between the rescuer and the rescued.

“He couldn’t help it, I suppose,” answered Peter, with a gleam in his eyes—­“he was born that way.”

“Born!  What stuff, Peter—­no man of any common-sense would have—­”

“I quite agree with you, my dear—­no man except a gentleman.  There is no telling what one of that kind might do under such circumstances.”  And with a wave of his hand and a twinkle in his merry scotch-terrier eyes, the old fellow disappeared below the handrail.

Miss Felicia leaned over the banisters: 

“Peter, peter,” she called after him, “where are you going?”

“To stay all night with Jack.”

“Well, that’s the most sensible thing I have heard of yet.  Will you take him a message from me?”

Peter looked up:  “Yes, Felicia, what is it?”

“Give him my love.”

CHAPTER XVI

Miss Felicia kept her promise to Ruth.  Before that young woman, indeed, tired out with anxiety, had opened her beautiful eyes the next morning and pushed back her beautiful hair from her beautiful face—­and it was still beautiful, despite all the storms it had met and weathered, the energetic, old lady had presented herself at the front door of Mrs. Hicks’s Boarding Hotel (it was but a step from MacFarlane’s) and had sent her name to the young man in the third floor back.

A stout person, with a head of adjustable hair held in place by a band of black velvet skewered by a gold pin, the whole surmounted by a flaring mob-cap of various hues and dyes, looked Miss Felicia all over and replied in a dubious tone: 

“He’s had a bad mash-up, and I don’t think—­”

“I am quite aware of it, my dear madam, or I would not be here.  Now, please show me the way to Mr. Breen’s room—­my brother was here last night and—­”

“Oh, the bald-headed gentleman?” exclaimed Mrs. Hicks.  “Such a dear, kind man; and it was as much as I could do to get him to bed and he a—­”