There came the Secretary, pale, poised, polished, gliding in pumps, and worshipping pomp and ceremony.  He counted out into Fuzzy’s hand ten ten-dollar bills; then dropped his eye upon the door, transferred it to James, its custodian, indicated the obnoxious earner of the reward with the other, and allowed his pumps to waft him away to secretarial regions.

James gathered Fuzzy with his own commanding optic and swept him as far as the front door.

When the money touched fuzzy’s dingy palm his first instinct was to take to his heels; but a second thought restrained him from that blunder of etiquette.  It was his; it had been given him.  It—­and, oh, what an elysium it opened to the gaze of his mind’s eye!  He had tumbled to the foot of the ladder; he was hungry, homeless, friendless, ragged, cold, drifting; and he held in his hand the key to a paradise of the mud-honey that he craved.  The fairy doll had waved a wand with her rag-stuffed hand; and now wherever he might go the enchanted palaces with shining foot-rests and magic red fluids in gleaming glassware would be open to him.

He followed James to the door.

He paused there as the flunky drew open the great mahogany portal for him to pass into the vestibule.

Beyond the wrought-iron gates in the dark highway Black Riley and his two pals casually strolled, fingering under their coats the inevitably fatal weapons that were to make the reward of the rag-doll theirs.

Fuzzy stopped at the Millionaire’s door and bethought himself.  Like little sprigs of mistletoe on a dead tree, certain living green thoughts and memories began to decorate his confused mind.  He was quite drunk, mind you, and the present was beginning to fade.  Those wreaths and festoons of holly with their scarlet berries making the great hall gay—­where had he seen such things before?  Somewhere he had known polished floors and odors of fresh flowers in winter, and—­and some one was singing a song in the house that he thought he had heard before.  Some one singing and playing a harp.  Of course, it was Christmas—­Fuzzy though he must have been pretty drunk to have overlooked that.

And then he went out of the present, and there came back to him out of some impossible, vanished, and irrevocable past a little, pure-white, transient, forgotten ghost—­the spirit of noblesse oblige.  Upon a gentleman certain things devolve.

James opened the outer door.  A stream of light went down the graveled walk to the iron gate.  Black Riley, McCarthy, and “One-ear” Mike saw, and carelessly drew their sinister cordon closer about the gate.

With a more imperious gesture than James’s master had ever used or could ever use, Fuzzy compelled the menial to close the door.  Upon a gentleman certain things devolve.  Especially at the Christmas season.

“It is cust—­customary,” he said to James, the flustered, “when a gentleman calls on Christmas Eve to pass the compliments of the season with the lady of the house.  You und’stand?  I shall not move shtep till I pass compl’ments season with lady the house.  Und’stand?”