It was just what he ought to have expected, and had been used to ever since he could remember; and generally he didn’t much mind, especially since his mother had become Mrs. Moffatt, and the father he had been most used to, and liked best, had abruptly disappeared from his life.  But the new hotel was big and strange, and his own room, in which there was not a toy or a book, or one of his dear battered relics (none of the new servants—­they were always new—­could find his things, or think where they had been put), seemed the loneliest spot in the whole house.  He had gone up there after his solitary luncheon, served in the immense marble dining-room by a footman on the same scale, and had tried to occupy himself with pasting post-cards into his album; but the newness and sumptuousness of the room embarrassed him—­the white fur rugs and brocade chairs seemed maliciously on the watch for smears and ink-spots—­and after a while he pushed the album aside and began to roam through the house.

He went to all the rooms in turn:  his mother’s first, the wonderful lacy bedroom, all pale silks and velvets, artful mirrors and veiled lamps, and the boudoir as big as a drawing-room, with pictures he would have liked to know about, and tables and cabinets holding things he was afraid to touch.  Mr. Moffatt’s rooms came next.  They were soberer and darker, but as big and splendid; and in the bedroom, on the brown wall, hung a single picture—­the portrait of a boy in grey velvet—­that interested Paul most of all.  The boy’s hand rested on the head of a big dog, and he looked infinitely noble and charming, and yet (in spite of the dog) so sad and lonely that he too might have come home that very day to a strange house in which none of his old things could be found.

From these rooms Paul wandered downstairs again.  The library attracted him most:  there were rows and rows of books, bound in dim browns and golds, and old faded reds as rich as velvet:  they all looked as if they might have had stories in them as splendid as their bindings.  But the bookcases were closed with gilt trellising, and when Paul reached up to open one, a servant told him that Mr. Moffatt’s secretary kept them locked because the books were too valuable to be taken down.  This seemed to make the library as strange as the rest of the house, and he passed on to the ballroom at the back.  Through its closed doors he heard a sound of hammering, and when he tried the door-handle a servant passing with a tray-full of glasses told him that “they” hadn’t finished, and wouldn’t let anybody in.

The mysterious pronoun somehow increased Paul’s sense of isolation, and he went on to the drawing-rooms, steering his way prudently between the gold arm-chairs and shining tables, and wondering whether the wigged and corseleted heroes on the walls represented Mr. Moffatt’s ancestors, and why, if they did, he looked so little like them.  The dining-room beyond was more amusing, because busy servants were already