le after one o'clock when he drove up to the Waldorf, and
after settling with the cabman, went into the office. He registered from
Washington; said his mother and father had been abroad, and that he
had come down to await the arrival of their steamer. He told his story
plausibly and had no trouble, since he volunteered to pay for them in
advance, in engaging his rooms; a sleeping room, sitting room, and bath.

Not once, but a hundred times, Paul had planned this entry into New
York. He had gone over every detail of it with Charley Edwards, and in
his scrapbook at home there were pages of description about New York
hotels, cut from the Sunday papers. When he was shown to his sitting
room on the eighth floor he saw at a glance that everything was as it
should be; there was but one detail in his mental picture that the
place did not realize, so he rang for the bellboy and sent him down for
flowers. He moved about nervously until the boy returned, putting
away his new linen and fingering it delightedly as he did so. When the
flowers came he put them hastily into water, and then tumbled into a hot
bath. Presently he came out of his white bathroom, resplendent in his
new silk underwear, and playing with the tassels of his red robe. The
snow was whirling so fiercely outside his windows that he could scarcely
see across the street, but within the air was deliciously soft and
fragrant. He put the violets and jonquils on the taboret beside the
couch, and threw himself down, with a long sigh, covering himself with
a Roman blanket. He was thoroughly tired; he had been in such haste,
he had stood up to such a strain, covered so much ground in the last
twenty-four hours, that he wanted to think how it had all come about.
Lulled by the sound of the wind, the warm air, and the cool fragrance of
the flowers, he sank into deep, drowsy retrospection.

It had been wonderfully simple; when they had shut him out of the
theater and concert hall, when they had taken away his bone, the
whole thing was virtually determined. The rest was a mere matter of
opportunity. The only thing that at all surprised him was his own
courage-for he realized well enough that he had always been tormented by
fear, a sort of apprehensive dread that, of late years, as the meshes of
the lies he had told closed about him, had been pulling the muscles of
his body tighter and tighter. Until now he could not remember the time
when he had not been dreading something. Even