Then his mind turned back a page in the book of his life and he lay considering the events of the previous evening:  the scene with Barney and Old Jimmie and Maggie, their all denouncing him as a police stool-pigeon and a squealer, and Maggie’s defiant departure to begin her long-dreamed-of career as a leading-woman and perhaps star in what she saw as great and thrilling adventures; his own enforced and frenzied flight; his strange method of reaching this splendid apartment; his meeting with the handsome, drink-befuddled young man in evening clothes; his meeting with the exquisitely gowned patrician Miss Sherwood, who had received him with the poise and frank friendliness of a democratic queen, and had immediately ordered him off to bed.

Strange, all of these things!  But they were all realities.  And in this new set of circumstances which had come into being in a night, what was he to do?

He recalled that Miss Sherwood had said that she and he would have their talk that morning.  He pulled his watch from under his pillow.  It was past nine o’clock.  He looked about him for clothes, but saw only a bathrobe.  Then he remembered Judkins carrying off his rain-soaked garments, with “Ring for me when you wake up, sir.”

Larry found an electric bell button dangling over the top of his bed by a silken cord.  He pushed the button and waited.  Within two minutes the door opened, and Judkins entered, laden with fresh garments.

“Good-morning, sir,” said Judkins.  “Your own clothes, and some shirts and other things I’ve borrowed from Mr. Dick.  How will you have your bath, sir—­hot or cold?”

“Cold,” said the bewildered Larry.

Judkins disappeared into the great white-tiled bathroom, there was the rush of splashing water for a few moments, then silence, and Judkins reappeared.

“Your bath is ready, sir.  I’ve laid out some of Mr. Dick’s razors.  How soon shall I bring you in your breakfast?”

“In about twenty minutes,” said Larry.

Exactly twenty minutes later Judkins carried in a tray, and set it on a table beside a window looking down into Park Avenue.  “Miss Sherwood asked me to tell you she would see you in the library at ten o’clock, sir—­where she saw you last night,” said Judkins, and noiselessly was gone.

Freshly shaven, tingling from his bath, with a sense of being garbed flawlessly, though in garments partly alien, Larry addressed himself to the breakfast of grapefruit, omelette, toast and coffee, served on Sevres china with covers of old silver.  In his more prosperous eras Larry had enjoyed the best private service that the best hotels in New York had to sell; but their best had been coarse and slovenly compared to this.  He would eat for a minute or two—­then get up and look at his carefully dressed self in the full-length mirror—­then gaze from his high, exclusive window down into Park Avenue with its stream of cars comfortably carrying their occupants toward ten o’clock jobs in Wall or Broad Streets—­and then he would return to his breakfast.  This was amazing—­bewildering!