hen,
distinguished and affluent looking, announce that he was looking for
something to do? He strained painfully at the thought. No, he could not
do that.

He really strolled about, thinking, and then, the weather being cold,
stepped into a hotel. He knew hotels well enough to know that any decent
individual was welcome to a chair in the lobby. This was in the Broadway
Central, which was then one of the most important hotels in the city.
Taking a chair here was a painful thing to him. To think he should come
to this! He had heard loungers about hotels called chairwarmers. He
had called them that himself in his day. But here he was, despite the
possibility of meeting some one who knew him, shielding himself from
cold and the weariness of the streets in a hotel lobby.

"I can't do this way," he said to himself. "There's no use of my
starting out mornings without first thinking up some place to go. I'll
think of some places and then look them up."

It occurred to him that the positions of bartenders were sometimes open,
but he put this out of his mind. Bartender--he, the ex-manager!

It grew awfully dull sitting in the hotel lobby, and so at four he went
home. He tried to put on a business air as he went in, but it was a
feeble imitation. The rocking chair in the dining-room was comfortable.
He sank into it gladly, with several papers he had bought, and began to
read.

As she was going through the room to begin preparing dinner, Carrie
said:

"The man was here for the rent to-day."

"Oh, was he?" said Hurstwood.

The least wrinkle crept into his brow as he remembered that this was
February 2d, the time the man always called. He fished down in his
pocket for his purse, getting the first taste of paying out when nothing
is coming in. He looked at the fat, green roll as a sick man looks at
the one possible saving cure. Then he counted off twenty-eight dollars.

"Here you are," he said to Carrie, when she came through again.

He buried himself in his papers and read. Oh, the rest of it--the relief
from walking and thinking! What Lethean waters were these floods of
telegraphed intelligence! He forgot his troubles, in part. Here was a
young, handsome woman, if you might believe the newspaper drawing, suing
a rich, fat, candy-making husband in Brooklyn for divorce. Here was
another item detailing the wrecking of a vessel in ice and snow off
Prince's Bay on Staten Island. A long, bright column told of the doings
in th