You would never have put him down as being sixty years of age had you known him as well as I did—­and it is a great pity you didn’t.  Really, now that I come to think of it, I never did put him down as being of any age at all.  Peter Grayson and age never seemed to have anything to do with each other.  Sometimes when I have looked in through the Receiving Teller’s window and have passed in my book—­I kept my account at the Exeter—­and he has lifted his bushy shutters and gazed at me suddenly with his merry Scotch-terrier eyes, I have caught, I must admit, a line of anxiety, or rather of concentrated cautiousness on his face, which for the moment made me think that perhaps he was looking a trifle older than when I last saw him; but all this was scattered to the winds when I met him an hour afterward swinging up Wall Street with that cheery lift of the heels so peculiarly his own, a lift that the occupants of every office window on both sides of the street knew to be Peter’s even when they failed to recognize the surtout and straight-brimmed high hat.  Had any doubting Thomas, however, walked beside him on his way up Broadway to his rooms on Fifteenth Street, and had the quick, almost boyish lift of Peter’s heels not entirely convinced the unbeliever of Peter’s youth, all questions would have been at once disposed of had the cheery bank teller invited him into his apartment up three flights of stairs over the tailor’s shop—­and he would have invited him had he been his friend—­and then and there forced him into an easy chair near the open wood fire, with some such remark as:  “Down, you rascal, and sit close up where I can get my hands on you!” No—­there was no trace of old age about Peter.

He was ready now—­hatted, coated and gloved—­not a hint of the ostrich egg or shaggy shutters visible, but a well-preserved bachelor of forty or forty-five; strictly in the mode and of the mode, looking more like some stray diplomat caught in the wiles of the Street, or some retired magnate, than a modest bank clerk on three thousand a year.  The next instant he was tripping down the granite steps between the rusty iron railings—­on his toes most of the way; the same cheery spring in his heels, slapping his thin, shapely legs with his tightly rolled umbrella, adjusting his hat at the proper angle so that the well-trimmed side whiskers—­the veriest little dabs of whiskers hardly an inch long—­would show as well as the fringes of his grey hair.

Not that he was anxious to conceal these slight indications of advancing years, nor did he have a spark of cheap personal vanity about him, but because it was his nature always to put his best foot foremost and keep it there; because, too, it behooved him in manner, dress and morals, to maintain the standards he had set for himself, he being a Grayson, with the best blood of the State in his veins, and with every table worth dining at open to him from Fourteenth Street to Murray Hill, and beyond.