“Don’t believe it’s hurt him a bit.  His letter didn’t sound like it.  Little Georgie ain’t a fool,” said Jem Belter.

Tom Wetherbee was looking over the letter referred to.  It had been written to the four conjointly, towards the termination of Selden’s visit to Mr. Penzance.  The young man was not an ardent or fluent correspondent; but Tom Wetherbee was chuckling as he read the epistle.

“Say, boys,” he said, “this big thing he’s keeping back to tell us when he sees us is all right, but what takes me is old George paying a visit to a parson.  He ain’t no Young Men’s Christian Association.”

Bert Johnson leaned forward, and looked at the address on the letter paper.

“Mount Dunstan Vicarage,” he read aloud.  “That looks pretty swell, doesn’t it?” with a laugh.  “Say, fellows, you know Jepson at the office, the chap that prides himself on reading such a lot?  He said it reminded him of the names of places in English novels.  That Johnny’s the biggest snob you ever set your tooth into.  When I told him about the lord fellow that owns the castle, and that George seemed to have seen him, he nearly fell over himself.  Never had any use for George before, but just you watch him make up to him when he sees him next.”

People were dropping in and taking seats at the tables.  They were all of one class.  Young men who lived in hall bedrooms.  Young women who worked in shops or offices, a couple here and there, who, living far uptown, had come to Shandy’s to dinner, that they might go to cheap seats in some theatre afterwards.  In the latter case, the girls wore their best hats, had bright eyes, and cheeks lightly flushed by their sense of festivity.  Two or three were very pretty in their thin summer dresses and flowered or feathered head gear, tilted at picturesque angles over their thick hair.  When each one entered the eyes of the young men at the corner table followed her with curiosity and interest, but the glances at her escort were always of a disparaging nature.

“There’s a beaut!” said Nick Baumgarten.  “Get onto that pink stuff on her hat, will you.  She done it because it’s just the colour of her cheeks.”

They all looked, and the girl was aware of it, and began to laugh and talk coquettishly to the young man who was her companion.

“I wonder where she got Clarence?” said Jem Belter in sarcastic allusion to her escort.  “The things those lookers have fastened on to them gets me.”

“If it was one of us, now,” said Bert Johnson.  Upon which they broke into simultaneous good-natured laughter.

“It’s queer, isn’t it,” young Baumgarten put in, “how a fellow always feels sore when he sees another fellow with a peach like that?  It’s just straight human nature, I guess.”

The door swung open to admit a newcomer, at the sight of whom Jem Belter exclaimed joyously:  “Good old Georgie!  Here he is, fellows!  Get on to his glad rags.”