Breen found his breath first:  “And you know him?”

“Know him!” cried the Magnate—­“of course I know him!  One of the most delightful men in New York; and I’m glad that you do—­you’re luckier than I—­try as I may I can hardly ever get him inside my house.”

I was sitting up for the old fellow when he entered his cosey red room and dropped into a chair before the fire.  I had seen the impression the young man had made upon him at the dinner and was anxious to learn the result of his visit.  I had studied the boy somewhat myself, noting his bright smile, clear, open face without a trace of guile, and the enthusiasm that took possession of him when his friend won the prize That he was outside the class of young men about him I could see from a certain timidity of glance and gesture—­as if he wanted to be kept in the background.  Would the old fellow, I wondered, burden his soul with still another charge?

Peter was laughing when he entered; he had laughed all the way down-town, he told me.  What particularly delighted him—­and here he related the Portman incident—­was the change in Breen’s face when old Portman grasped his hand so cordially.

“Made of pinchbeck, my dear Major, both of them, and yet how genuine it looks on the surface, and what a lot of it is in circulation.  Quite as good as the real thing if you don’t know the difference,” and again he laughed heartily.

“And the boy,” I asked, “was he disappointing?”

“Young Breen?—­not a bit of it.  He’s like all the young fellows who come up here from the South—­especially the country districts—­and he’s from western Maryland, he says.  Got queer ideas about work and what a gentleman should do to earn his living—­same old talk.  Hot-house plants most of them—­never amount to anything, really, until they are pruned and set out in the cold.”

“Got any sense?” I ventured.

“No, not much—­not yet—­but he’s got temperament and refinement and a ten commandments’ code of morals.”

“Rather rare, isn’t it?” I asked.

“Yes—­perhaps so.”

“And I suppose you are going to take him up and do for him, like the others.”

Peter picked up the poker and made a jab at the fire; then he answered slowly: 

“Well, Major, I can’t tell yet—­not positively.  But he’s certainly worth saving.”

CHAPTER VII

With the closing of the front door upon the finest Old Gentleman in the World, a marked change took place in the mental mechanism of several of our most important characters.  The head of the firm of Breen & Co. was so taken aback that for the moment that shrewdest of financiers was undecided as to whether he or Parkins should rush out into the night after the departing visitor and bring him back, and open the best in the cellar.  “Send a man out of my house,” he said to himself, “whom Portman couldn’t get to his table except at rare intervals!  Well, that’s one on me!”