“I beg your pardon, Mr. Stirling, for declining to recognize any one whom you are good enough to wish to introduce to me, but that man I must decline to recognize.  He is not a gentleman.”

“I doubt if you know one,” said Ferdy, with a shrug, as he strolled away with affected indifference.  But a dozen men had seen the cut.

“I guess you are right enough about that, General,” said one of them.

When the General reflected on what he had done, he was overwhelmed with remorse.  He apologized profusely to Stirling for having committed such a solecism.

“I am nothing but an irascible old idiot, sir, and I hope you will excuse my constitutional weakness, but I really could not recognize that man.”

Stirling’s inveterate amiability soon set him at ease again.

“It is well for Wickersham to hear the truth now and then,” he said.  “I guess he hears it rarely enough.  Most people feed him on lies.”

Some others appeared to take the same view of the matter, for the General was more popular than ever.

Gordon found a new zest in showing his father about the city.  Everything astonished him.  He saw the world with the eyes of a child.  The streets, the crowds, the shop-windows, the shimmering stream of carriages that rolled up and down the avenue, the elevated railways which had just been constructed, all were a marvel to him.

“Where do these people get their wealth?” he asked.

“Some of them get it from rural gentlemen who visit the town,” said Gordon, laughing.

The old fellow smiled.  “I suspect a good many of them get it from us countrymen.  In fact, at the last we furnish it all.  It all comes out of the ground.”

“It is a pity that we did not hold on to some of it,” said Gordon.

The old gentleman glanced at him.  “I do not want any of it.  My son, Agar’s standard was the best:  ‘neither poverty nor riches.’  Riches cannot make a gentleman.”

Keith laughed and called him old-fashioned, but he knew in his heart that he was right.

The beggars who accosted him on the street never turned away empty-handed.  He had it not in his heart to refuse the outstretched hand of want.

“Why, that man who pretended that he had a large family and was out of work is a fraud,” said Gordon.  “I’ll bet that he has no family and never works.”

“Well, I didn’t give him much,” said the old man.  “But remember what Lamb said:  ’Shut not thy purse-strings always against painted distress.  It is good to believe him.  Give, and under the personate father of a family think, if thou pleasest, that thou hast relieved an indigent bachelor.’”

A week later Gordon was on his way to England and the General had returned home.

It was just after this that the final breach took place between Norman Wentworth and his wife.  It was decided that for their children’s sake there should be no open separation; at least, for the present.  Norman had business which would take him away for a good part of the time, and the final separation could be left to the future.  Meanwhile, to save appearances somewhat, it was arranged that Mrs. Wentworth should ask Lois Huntington to come up and spend the winter in New York, partly as her companion and partly as governess for the children.  This might stop the mouths of some persons.