“And so must you, until you prove them dirty. Now, will you do me a very great kindness and yourself one as well? Please go downstairs, rap three times at Mr. Cohen's shutters--hard, so that he can hear you--that's my signal--present my compliments and ask him to be kind enough to come up and have a cigar with us.” Jack leaned forward in his seat, his face showing his astonishment. “You don't mean it?” “I do.” “All right.” The boy was out of his chair and clattering down-stairs before Peter could add another word to his message. If he had asked him to crawl out on the roof and drop himself into the third-story window of the next house, he would have obeyed him with the same alacrity. Peter wheeled up another chair; added some small and large glasses to the collection on the tray and awaited Jack's return. The experience was not new. The stupid, illogical prejudice was not confined to inexperienced lads. He had had the same thing to contend with dozens of times before. Even Holker had once said: “Peter, what the devil do you find in that little shrimp of a Hebrew to interest you? Is he cold that you warm him, or hungry that you feed him,--or lonely that--” “Stop right there, Holker! You've said it,--lonely--that's it--LONELY! That's what made me bring him up the first time he was ever here. It seemed such a wicked thing to me to have him at one end of the house--the bottom end, too--crooning over a fire, and I at the top end crooning over another, when one blaze could warm us both. So up he came, Holker, and now it is I who am lonely when a week passes and Isaac does not tap at my door, or I tap at his.” The distinguished architect understood it all a week later when the new uptown synagogue was being talked of and he was invited to meet the board, and found to his astonishment that the wise little man with the big gold spectacles, occupying the chair was none other than Peter's tailor. “Our mutual friend Mr. Grayson, of the Exeter Bank, spoke to me about you, Mr. Morris,” said the little man without a trace of foreign accent and with all the composure of a great banker making a government loan; rising at the same time, with great dignity introducing Morris to his brother trustees and then placing him in the empty seat next his own. After that, and on more than one occasion, there were three chairs around Peter's blaze, with Morris in one of them. All these thoughts coursed through Peter's head as Jack and Cohen were mounting the three flights of stairs. “Ah, Isaac,” he cried at first sight of his friend, “I just wanted you to know my boy, Jack Breen, better, and as his legs are younger than mine, I sent him down instead of going myself--you don't mind, do you?” “Mind!--of course I do not mind,--but I do know Mr. Breen. I first met him many months ago--when your sister was here--and then I see him going in and out all the time--and--”