On the part of the hotel management, Paul excited no suspicion.  There was this to be said for him, that he wore his spoils with dignity and in no way made himself conspicuous.  His chief greediness lay in his ears and eyes, and his excesses were not offensive ones.  His dearest pleasures were the grey winter twilights in his sitting-room; his quiet enjoyment of his flowers, his clothes, his wide divan, his cigarette and his sense of power.  He could not remember a time when he had felt so at peace with himself.  The mere release from the necessity of petty lying, lying every day and every day, restored his self-respect.  He had never lied for pleasure, even at school; but to make himself noticed and admired, to assert his difference from other Cordelia Street boys; and he felt a good deal more manly, more honest, even, now that he had no need for boastful pretensions, now that he could, as his actor friends used to say, “dress the part.”  It was characteristic that remorse did not occur to him.  His golden days went by without a shadow, and he made each as perfect as he could.

On the eighth day after his arrival in New York, he found the whole affair exploited in the Pittsburgh papers, exploited with a wealth of detail which indicated that local news of a sensational nature was at a low ebb.  The firm of Denny & Carson announced that the boy’s father had refunded the full amount of his theft, and that they had no intention of prosecuting.  The Cumberland minister had been interviewed, and expressed his hope of yet reclaiming the motherless lad, and Paul’s Sabbath-school teacher declared that she would spare no effort to that end.  The rumour had reached Pittsburgh that the boy had been seen in a New York hotel, and his father had gone East to find him and bring him home.

Paul had just come in to dress for dinner; he sank into a chair, weak in the knees, and clasped his head in his hands.  It was to be worse than jail, even; the tepid waters of Cordelia Street were to close over him finally and forever.  The grey monotony stretched before him in hopeless, unrelieved years; Sabbath-school, Young People’s Meeting, the yellow-papered room, the damp dish-towels; it all rushed back upon him with sickening vividness.  He had the old feeling that the orchestra had suddenly stopped, the sinking sensation that the play was over.  The sweat broke out on his face, and he sprang to his feet, looked about him with his white, conscious smile, and winked at himself in the mirror.  With something of the childish belief in miracles with which he had so often gone to class, all his lessons unlearned, Paul dressed and dashed whistling down the corridor to the elevator.