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! He was toward the end of his omelette when a knock sounded at his door. Thinking Judkins had returned, he called, “Come in”; but instead of Judkins the opening door admitted the belligerent young man in rumpled evening clothes of the previous night. Now he wore a silk dressing-gown of a flamboyant peacock blue, his feet showed bare in toe slippers, his wavy, yellowish hair had the tousled effect of a very recent separation from a pillow. A cigarette depended from the corner of his mouth. Larry started to rise. But the young man arrested the motion with a gesture of mock imperativeness. “Keep your seat, fair sir; I would fain have speech with thee.” He crossed and sat on a corner of Larry's table, one slippered foot dangling, and looked Larry over with an appraising eye. “Permit me to remark, sir,” he continued in his grand manner, “that you look as though you might be some one.” “Is that what you wanted to tell me, Mr. Sherwood?” queried Larry. The other's grand manner vanished and he grinned. “Forget the 'Mr. Sherwood,' or you'll make me feel not at home in my own house,” he begged with humorous mournfulness. “Call me Dick. Everybody else does. That's settled. Now to the reason for this visitation at such an ungodly hour. Sis has just been in picking on me. Says I was rude to you last night. I suppose I was. I'd had several from my private stock early in the evening; and several more around in jovial Manhattan joints where prohibition hasn't checked the flow of happiness if you know the countersign. The cumulative effect you saw, and were the victim of. I apologize, sir.” “That's all right, Mr.--” “Dick is what I said,” interrupted the other. “Dick, then. It's all right. I understand.” “Thanks. I'll call you Old Captain Nemo for short. Sis didn't tell me your name or anything about you, and she said I wasn't to ask you questions. But whatever Isabel does is usually one hundred percent right. She said I'd probably be seeing a lot of you, so I'll introduce myself. You'd learn all about me from some one else, anyhow, so you might as well learn about me from me and get an impartial and unbiased statement. Clever of me, ain't it, to beat 'em to it?”