handkerchief, unhooked his
overcoat from a peg behind the door (a gray surtout cut something like
the first Napoleon's) and stepped out to where I sat.

You would never have put him down as being sixty years of age had you
known him as well as I did--and it is a great pity you didn't. Really,
now that I come to think of it, I never did put him down as being of any
age at all. Peter Grayson and age never seemed to have anything to do
with each other. Sometimes when I have looked in through the Receiving
Teller's window and have passed in my book--I kept my account at the
Exeter--and he has lifted his bushy shutters and gazed at me suddenly
with his merry Scotch-terrier eyes, I have caught, I must admit, a line
of anxiety, or rather of concentrated cautiousness on his face, which
for the moment made me think that perhaps he was looking a trifle older
than when I last saw him; but all this was scattered to the winds when I
met him an hour afterward swinging up Wall Street with that cheery lift
of the heels so peculiarly his own, a lift that the occupants of every
office window on both sides of the street knew to be Peter's even when
they failed to recognize the surtout and straight-brimmed high hat. Had
any doubting Thomas, however, walked beside him on his way up Broadway
to his rooms on Fifteenth Street, and had the quick, almost boyish lift
of Peter's heels not entirely convinced the unbeliever of Peter's youth,
all questions would have been at once disposed of had the cheery bank
teller invited him into his apartment up three flights of stairs
over the tailor's shop--and he would have invited him had he been his
friend--and then and there forced him into an easy chair near the open
wood fire, with some such remark as: "Down, you rascal, and sit close
up where I can get my hands on you!" No--there was no trace of old age
about Peter.

He was ready now--hatted, coated and gloved--not a hint of the ostrich
egg or shaggy shutters visible, but a well-preserved bachelor of forty
or forty-five; strictly in the mode and of the mode, looking more like
some stray diplomat caught in the wiles of the Street, or some retired
magnate, than a modest bank clerk on three thousand a year. The next
instant he was tripping down the granite steps between the rusty iron
railings--on his toes most of the way; the same cheery spring in his
heels, slapping his thin, shapely legs with his tightly rolled umbrella,
adjusting his hat at the prope