Payson's attention when he
least desired it, but they did not cause him to alter his intention to
get his hooks into his father's whole residuary estate and keep it for
himself. He had, you observe, a conscience, but it couldn't stand up
against twenty-five thousand dollars reinforced by perfectly sound legal
arguments.

No, he had a good excuse for not being a gentleman and a sportsman and
he did not purpose to look for any reasons for doing differently. Then
unexpectedly he was invited to dinner by Mr. Ephraim Tutt in a funny
old ramshackle house on West Twenty-third Street with ornamented iron
piazza railings all covered with the withered stalks of long dead
wistarias, and something happened to him. "Payson Clifford's Twenty-five
Thousand Dollar Dinner." He had no suspicion, of course, what was coming
to him when he went there,--went, merely because Mr. Tutt was one of the
very few friends of his father that he knew. And he held towards the old
lawyer rather the same sort of patronizing attitude that he had had
towards the old man. It would be a rotten dinner probably followed by a
deadly dull evening with a snuffy old fossil who would tell him
long-winded, rambling anecdotes of what New York had been like when
there were wild goats in Central Park.

The snuffy old fossil, however, made no reference whatever to either old
New York or wild goats,--the nearest he came to it being wild oats.
Instead he began the dreary evening by opening a cupboard on his library
wall and disclosing three long bottles, from which he partially filled a
shining silver receptacle containing cracked ice. This he shook with
astonishing skill and vigor, meantime uttering loud outcries of
"Miranda! Fetch up the mint!" Then a buxom colored lady in calico--with
a grin like that which made Aunt Sallie famous--having appeared,
panting, with two large glasses and a bundle of green herbage upon a
silver salver, the old fossil poured out a seething decoction--of which
like only the memory remains--performed an incantation over each glass
with the odoriferous greens, smiled fondly upon the work of his hands
and remarked with amiable hospitality, "Well, my son! Glad to see
you!--Here's how!"

Almost immediately a benign animal magnetism pervaded the bosom of
Payson Clifford, and from his bosom reached out through his arteries and
veins, his arterioles and venioles, to the uttermost ends of his being.
He perceived in an instant that Mr. Tutt was no