ot wait to have his silver marked, he
said. Lastly, he stopped at a trunk shop on Broadway, and had his
purchases packed into various travelling bags.

It was a little 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 offered 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
scrap book 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
bell boy 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
bath-room, 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
tabouret 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 theatre
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 t