By five o'clock the next afternoon Ewing had ended his journey in an upper room of the Stuyvesant Hotel. This hostelry flaunts an outworn magnificence. Its hangings are dingy, its plenteous gilt is tarnished; and it seems to live on memories of a past when fashion splendidly thronged its corridors. But peace lies beyond the gloom of its portals, and Ewing was glad to be housed from the dazing tumult outside. Nothing reached him now but the muted rhythm of horses' feet on the asphalt below, and this but recalled agreeably to him that his solitude was an artificial thing of four walls. He had no wish to forget that the world waited beyond his door. He fell back on the sofa, a once lordly thing of yellow satin, now frayed and faded, to eye the upper reaches of the room. The high, blue-tinted ceiling was scarred and cracked. Depending from its center a huge chandelier dangled glittering prisms of glass. An immense mirror in a gilt frame, lavishly rococo, rested on the mantel of carved white marble. Heavy lace curtains, shrouding the two broad windows, made a restful half light. He had awakened to hills that morning, wooded hills and well towned. Then had come veritable cities, rich to him with all romance under their angular, smoky ugliness. And at last had come the real city--the end of the world and its center. He discovered it beyond a stretch of white-flecked water alive with strange craft. Its clean, straight, myriad-windowed towers glowed under a slanting sun in an air as crystal clear as that of his own hills. A vista of heart-shaking surprises unfolded ahead of the great boat they boarded, a boat with a heart strongly beating in tune with his own. Too soon it nosed its way, with a sort of clumsy finesse, into a pile-walled pocket. There followed the keen, quick rattling of a cogged wheel and a rush of people who seemed insufficiently impressed by the magnitude of the event. Then they entered a cab, to be driven from a throng of other cabs and jostling pedestrians through the maze of a dream come true. He tried not to ignore his companion for glimpses of that strange life through the cab window. Very casually she had said at parting, "Thank you so much for all your care of me--and dine with us at seven-thirty, won't you? I shall try to have a friend here that I think may help you."