HUGO

CHAPTER I

THE DOME

He wakened from a charming dream, in which the hat had played a
conspicuous part.

'I shouldn't mind having that hat,' he murmured.

A darkness which no eye could penetrate surrounded him as he lay in bed.
Absolute obscurity was essential to the repose of that singular brain,
and he had perfected arrangements for supplying the deficiencies of
Nature's night.

He touched a switch, and in front of him at a distance of thirty feet
the ivory dial of a clock became momentarily visible under the soft
yellow of a shaded electric globe. It was fifteen minutes past six. At
the same moment a bell sounded the quarter in delicate tones, which fell
on the ear as lightly as dew. In the upper gloom could be discerned the
contours of a vast dome, decorated in turquoise-blue and gold.

He pressed a button near the switch. A portiere rustled, and a young man
approached his bed--a short, thin, pale, fair young man, active and
deferential.

'My tea, Shawn. Draw the curtains and open the windows.'

'Yes, sir,' said Simon Shawn.

In an instant the room was brilliantly revealed as a great circular
apartment, magnificently furnished, with twelve windows running round
the circumference beneath the dome. The virginal zephyrs of a July
morning wandered in. The sun, although fierce, slanted his rays through
the six eastern windows, printing a new pattern on the Tripoli carpets.
Between the windows were bookcases, full of precious and extraordinary
volumes, and over the bookcases hung pictures of the Barbizon school.
These books and these pictures were the elegant monument of hobbies
which their owner had outlived. His present hobby happened to be music.
A Steinway grand-piano was prominent in the chamber, and before the
ebony instrument stood a mechanical pianoforte-player.

'I must have that hat.'

He paused reflectively, leaning on one elbow, as he made the tea which
Simon Shawn had brought and left on the night-table. And again, at the
third cup, he repeated to himself that he must possess the hat.

He had a passion for tea. His servants had received the strictest orders
to supply him at early morn with materials sufficient only for two cups.
Nevertheless, they were always a little generous, and, by cheating
himself slightly in the first and the second cup, the votary could
often, to his intense joy, conjure a third out of the pot.

After glancing through the newspaper which accompanied