Moreover, the outdoor life which he had so longed for was his again.  On Saturday afternoons and Sundays he tramped the hills, or spent hours rowing on the river.  His employer’s villa was also always open to him—­a privilege not granted to the others in the working force.  The old tie of family was the sesame.  Judge Breen’s son was, both by blood and training, the social equal of any man, and although the distinguished engineer, being well born himself, seldom set store on such things, he recognized his obligation in Jack’s case and sought the first opportunity to tell him so.

“You will find a great change in your surroundings, Mr. Breen,” he had said.  “The little hotel where you will have to put up is rather rough and uncomfortable, but you are always welcome at my home, and this I mean, and I hope you will understand it that way without my mentioning it again.”

The boy’s heart leaped to his throat as he listened, and a dozen additional times that day his eyes had rested on the clump of trees which shaded the roof sheltering Ruth.

That the exclusive Miss Grayson should now have invited him to pass some days at her home had brought with it a thrill of greater delight.  Her opinion of the boy had changed somewhat.  His willingness to put up with the discomforts of the village inn—­“a truly dreadful place,” to quote one of Miss Felicia’s own letters —­and to continue to put up with them for more than two years, while losing nothing of his good-humor and good manners, had shaken her belief in the troubadour and tin-armor theory, although nothing in Jack’s surroundings or in his prospects for the future fitted him, so far as she could see, to life companionship with so dear a girl as her beloved Ruth—­a view which, of course, she kept strictly to herself.

But she still continued to criticise him, at which Peter would rub his hands and break out with: 

“Fine fellow!—­square peg in a square hole this time.  Fine fellow, I tell you, Felicia!”

He receiving in reply some such answer as: 

“Yes, quite lovely in fairy tales, Peter, and when you have taught him—­for you did it, remember—­how to shovel and clean up underbrush and split rocks—­and that just’s what Ruth told me he was doing when she took a telegram to her father which had come to the house—­and he in a pair of overalls, like any common workman—­ what, may I ask, will you have him doing next?  Is he to be an engineer or a clerk all his life?  He might have had a share in his uncle’s business by this time if he had had any common-sense;” Peter retorting often with but a broad smile and that little gulp of satisfaction—­something between a chuckle and a sigh—­which always escaped him when some one of his proteges were living up to his pet theories.

And yet it was Miss Felicia herself who was the first to welcome the reprobate, even going to the front door and standing in the icy draught, with the snowflakes whirling about her pompadoured head, until Jack had alighted from the tail-end of Moggins’s ’bus and, with his satchel in his hand, had cleared the sidewalk with a bound and stood beside her.