With the closing of the front door upon the finest Old Gentleman in the World, a marked change took place in the mental mechanism of several of our most important characters.

The head of the firm of Breen & Co.

was so taken aback that for the moment that shrewdest of financiers was undecided as to whether he or Parkins should rush out into the night after the departing visitor and bring him back, and open the best in the cellar.

"Send a man out of my house," he said to himself, "whom Portman couldn't get to his table except at rare intervals! Well, that's one on me!" The lid that covered the upper half of Parkins's intelligence also received a jolt; it was a coal-hole lid that covered emptiness, but now and then admitted the light.
"Might 'ave known from the clothes 'e wore 'e was no common PUR-son," he said to himself.

"To tell you the truth--" this to the second man in the potato-bug waistcoat, when they were dividing between them the bottle of "Extra Dry" three-quarters full, that Parkins had smuggled into the pantry with the empty bottles ("Dead Men," Breen called them)--"to tell you the truth, Frederick, when I took 'is 'at and coat hupstairs 'e give me a real start 'e looked that respectable" As to Jack, not only his mind but his heart were in a whirl.
Half the night he lay awake wondering what he could do to follow Peter's advice while preserving his own ideals.