if I had picked up everybody who wanted to know me, as Jack
has done, where would I be now?" Then, his mind still clouded by the
night at the club (he had not confined himself entirely to champagne),
he began, as was his custom, to concentrate his attention upon the
work of the day--on the way the market would open; on the remittance
a belated customer had promised and about which he had some doubt; the
meeting of the board of directors in the new mining company--"The Great
Mukton Lode," in which he had an interest, and a large one--etc.

Jack looked out of the windows, his eyes taking in the remnants of
the autumnal tints in the Park, now nearly gone, the crowd filling
the sidewalks; the lumbering stages and the swifter-moving horse-cars
crammed with eager men anxious to begin the struggle of the day--not
with their hands--that mob had swept past hours before--but with their
brains--wits against wits and the devil take the man who slips and
falls.

Nothing of it all interested him. His mind was on the talk at the
breakfast table, especially his uncle's ideas of hospitality, all of
which had appalled and disgusted him. With his father there had always
been a welcome for every one, no matter what the position in life, the
only standard being one of breeding and character--and certainly Peter
had both. His uncle had helped him, of course--put him under obligations
he could never repay. Yet after all, it was proved now to him that he
was but a guest in the house enjoying only such rights as any other
guest might possess, and with no voice in the welcome--a condition
which would never be altered, until he became independent himself--a
possibility which at the moment was too remote to be considered. Then
his mind reverted to his conversation the night before with Mr. Grayson
and with this change of thought his father's portrait--the one that hung
in his room--loomed up. He had the night before turned on the lights--to
their fullest--and had scanned the picture closely, eager to find some
trace of Peter in the counterfeit presentment of the man he loved best,
and whose memory was still almost a religion, but except that both Peter
and his father were bald, and that both wore high, old-fashioned collars
and neck-cloths, he had been compelled to admit with a sigh that there
was nothing about the portrait on which to base the slightest claim to
resemblance.

"Yet he's like my father, he is, he is," he kept repeating to himsel