ving the store when he
encountered Reggie van Tuyl, who was drifting along in somnambulistic
fashion near Thirty-Ninth Street.

"Hullo, Reggie old thing!" said Archie.

"Hullo!" said Reggie, a man of few words.

"I've just been buying a book for Bill Brewster," went on Archie. "It
appears that old Bill--What's the matter?"

He broke off his recital abruptly. A sort of spasm had passed across
his companion's features. The hand holding Archie's arm had tightened
convulsively. One would have said that Reginald had received a shock.

"It's nothing," said Reggie. "I'm all right now. I caught sight of that
fellow's clothes rather suddenly. They shook me a bit. I'm all right
now," he said, bravely.

Archie, following his friend's gaze, understood. Reggie van Tuyl was
never at his strongest in the morning, and he had a sensitive eye for
clothes. He had been known to resign from clubs because members exceeded
the bounds in the matter of soft shirts with dinner-jackets. And the
short, thick-set man who was standing just in front of them in attitude
of restful immobility was certainly no dandy. His best friend could
not have called him dapper. Take him for all in all and on the hoof, he
might have been posing as a model for a sketch of What the Well-Dressed
Man Should Not Wear.

In costume, as in most other things, it is best to take a definite line
and stick to it. This man had obviously vacillated. His neck was swathed
in a green scarf; he wore an evening-dress coat; and his lower limbs
were draped in a pair of tweed trousers built for a larger man. To the
north he was bounded by a straw hat, to the south by brown shoes.

Archie surveyed the man's back carefully.

"Bit thick!" he said, sympathetically. "But of course Broadway isn't
Fifth Avenue. What I mean to say is, Bohemian licence and what not.
Broadway's crammed with deuced brainy devils who don't care how they
look. Probably this bird is a master-mind of some species."

"All the same, man's no right to wear evening-dress coat with tweed
trousers."

"Absolutely not! I see what you mean."

At this point the sartorial offender turned. Seen from the front, he was
even more unnerving. He appeared to possess no shirt, though this defect
was offset by the fact that the tweed trousers fitted snugly under the
arms. He was not a handsome man. At his best he could never have been
that, and in the recent past he had managed to acquire a scar that ran
from the corner of