On the half hour Phillips had finished his duties as slave of the lamp.  The waiters from the restaurant below had whisked aloft the delectable dinner.  The dining table, laid for two, glowed cheerily in the glow of the pink-shaded candles.

And now Phillips, as though he ushered a cardinal—­or held in charge a burglar—­wafted in the shivering guest who had been haled from the line of mendicant lodgers.

It is a common thing to call such men wrecks; if the comparison be used here it is the specific one of a derelict come to grief through fire.  Even yet some flickering combustion illuminated the drifting hulk.  His face and hands had been recently washed—­a rite insisted upon by Phillips as a memorial to the slaughtered conventions.  In the candle-light he stood, a flaw in the decorous fittings of the apartment.  His face was a sickly white, covered almost to the eyes with a stubble the shade of a red Irish setter’s coat.  Phillips’s comb had failed to control the pale brown hair, long matted and conformed to the contour of a constantly worn hat.  His eyes were full of a hopeless, tricky defiance like that seen in a cur’s that is cornered by his tormentors.  His shabby coat was buttoned high, but a quarter inch of redeeming collar showed above it.  His manner was singularly free from embarrassment when Chalmers rose from his chair across the round dining table.

“If you will oblige me,” said the host, “I will be glad to have your company at dinner.”

“My name is Plumer,” said the highway guest, in harsh and aggressive tones.  “If you’re like me, you like to know the name of the party you’re dining with.”

“I was going on to say,” continued Chalmers somewhat hastily, “that mine is Chalmers.  Will you sit opposite?”

Plumer, of the ruffled plumes, bent his knee for Phillips to slide the chair beneath him.  He had an air of having sat at attended boards before.  Phillips set out the anchovies and olives.

“Good!” barked Plumer; “going to be in courses, is it?  All right, my jovial ruler of Bagdad.  I’m your Scheherezade all the way to the toothpicks.  You’re the first Caliph with a genuine Oriental flavor I’ve struck since frost.  What luck!  And I was forty-third in line.  I finished counting, just as your welcome emissary arrived to bid me to the feast.  I had about as much chance of getting a bed to-night as I have of being the next President.  How will you have the sad story of my life, Mr. Al Raschid—­a chapter with each course or the whole edition with the cigars and coffee?”

“The situation does not seem a novel one to you,” said Chalmers with a smile.