“I didn't get the letter until half an hour before I reached here.” “Why, I sent it to your uncle's house, and mailed it myself, just after you had gone out with Miss MacFarlane.” “Yes, sir; but I am not at my uncle's house any more. I am staying with Garry Minott in his rooms; I have the sofa.” Peter gave a low whistle. “And you have given up your desk at the office as well?” “Yes, sir.” “Bless my soul, my boy! And what are you going to do now?” “I don't know; but I will not go on as I have been doing. I can't, Mr. Grayson, and you must not ask it. I would rather sweep the streets. I have just seen poor Charley Gilbert and Mrs. Gilbert. He has not a dollar in the world, and is going West, he tells me.” Peter reflected for a moment. It was all he could do to hide his delight. “And what do your people say?” “My aunt says I am an idiot, and Corinne won't speak to me.” “And your uncle?” “Nothing, to me. He told Garry that if I didn't come back in three days I should never enter his house or his office again.” “But you are going back? Are you not?” “No,--never. Not if I starve!” Peter's eyes were twinkling when he related the conversation to me the next day. “I could have hugged him, Major,” he said, when he finished, “and I would if we had not been at the club.” CHAPTER XIII The Scribe is quite positive that had you only heard about it as he had, even with the details elaborated, not only by Peter, who was conservatism itself in his every statement, but by Miss Felicia as well--who certainly ought to have known--you would not have believed it possible until you had seen it. Even then you would have had to drop into one of Miss Felicia's cretonne-upholstered chairs--big easy-chairs that fitted into every hollow and bone in your back--looked the length of the uneven porch, run your astonished eye down the damp, water-soaked wooden steps to the moist brick pavement below, and so on to the beds of crocuses blooming beneath the clustering palms and orange trees, before you could realize (in spite of the drifting snow heaped up on the door-steps of her house outside--some of it still on your shoes) that you were in Miss Felicia's tropical garden, attached to Miss Felicia's Geneseo house, and not in the back yard of some old home in the far-off sunny South. It was an old story, of course, to Peter, who had the easy-chair beside me, and so it was to Morris, who had helped Miss Felicia carry out so Utopian a scheme, but it had come to me as a complete surprise, and I was still wide-eyed and incredulous. “And what keeps out the cold?” I asked Morris, who was lying back blowing rings into the summer night, the glow of an overhead lantern lighting up his handsome face. “Glass,” he laughed. “Where?”