"The old man'll beat the stuffin' outa me," Tim demurred. "He's done that before, an' you don't seem to be much missing," Young Dick callously rejoined. "Say the word, an' we'll meet at the Ferry Building at nine to-night. What d'ye say? I'll be there." "Supposin' I don't show up?" Tim asked. "I'll be on my way just the same." Young Dick turned as if to depart, paused casually, and said over his shoulder, "Better come along." Tim shook up the beer as he answered with equal casualness, "Aw right. I'll be there." After parting from Tim Hagan Young Dick spent a busy hour or so looking up one, Marcovich, a Slavonian schoolmate whose father ran a chop-house in which was reputed to be served the finest twenty-cent meal in the city. Young Marcovich owed Young Dick two dollars, and Young Dick accepted the payment of a dollar and forty cents as full quittance of the debt. Also, with shyness and perturbation, Young Dick wandered down Montgomery Street and vacillated among the many pawnshops that graced that thoroughfare. At last, diving desperately into one, he managed to exchange for eight dollars and a ticket his gold watch that he knew was worth fifty at the very least. Dinner in the Nob Hill palace was served at six-thirty. He arrived at six-forty-five and encountered Mrs. Summerstone. She was a stout, elderly, decayed gentlewoman, a daughter of the great Porter-Rickington family that had shaken the entire Pacific Coast with its financial crash in the middle seventies. Despite her stoutness, she suffered from what she called shattered nerves. "This will never, never do, Richard," she censured. "Here is dinner waiting fifteen minutes already, and you have not yet washed your face and hands." "I am sorry, Mrs. Summerstone," Young Dick apologized. "I won't keep you waiting ever again. And I won't bother you much ever." At dinner, in state, the two of them alone in the great dining room, Young Dick strove to make things easy for the lady, whom, despite his knowledge that she was on his pay-roll, he felt toward as a host must feel toward a guest. "You'll be very comfortable here," he promised, "once you are settled down. It's a good old house, and most of the servants have been here for years." "But, Richard," she smiled seriously to him; "it is not the servants who will determine my happiness here. It is you." "I'll do my best," he said graciously. "Better than that. I'm sorry I came in late for dinner. In years and years you'll never see me late again. I won't bother you at all. You'll see. It will be just as though I wasn't in the house." When he bade her good night, on his way to bed, he added, as a last thought: