Awakening at a late hour in a small bedroom bright with sunlight, Mr. Matthias treated himself to a moment of incredulity. Such surroundings were strange to his drowsy perceptions, and his transitory emotions on finding himself so curiously embedded might be most aptly and tersely summed up in the exclamation of the old lady in the nursery rhyme: "Lack-a-mercy, can this be I?" Being, however, susceptible to a conviction of singular strength that he was himself and none other; and by dint of sheer will-power overcoming a tremendous disinclination to do anything but lie still and feel perfectly healthy, sound, and at peace with the world: he induced himself to roll over and fish for his watch in the pocket of the coat hanging on a nearby chair. The hour proved to be half-past ten. He fancied that he must have been uncommonly tired to have slept so late. Then he remembered. "One doesn't need to get drunk to be daft," was the conclusion he enunciated to his loneliness. "I hope to goodness she doesn't go poking through my papers!" The perturbation to which this thought gave rise got him out of bed more promptly than would otherwise have been the case. None the less he forgot it entirely in another moment, and had bathed and dressed and was knotting his tie before a mirror when the memory of the girl again flitted darkly athwart the glass of his consciousness. "Wonder what it was that made me turn myself out of house and home for the sake of that girl, anyway? Something about her...." But try as he might he could recall no definite details of her personality. She remained a shadow--a hunted, tearful, desperate wraith of girlhood: more than that, nothing. He wagged his head seriously. "Something about her!... _Must_'ve been good-looking ... or something...." With which he drifted off into an inconsequent and irrelevant reverie which entertained him exclusively throughout breakfast and his brief homeward walk: in his magnificent, pantoscopic, protean imagination he was busily engaged in writing the first act of a splendid new play--something exquisitely odd, original, witty, and dramatic. A vague smile touched the corners of his mouth; his eyes were hazily lustrous; his nose was in the air. He had forgotten his guest entirely. He ran up the steps of Number 289, let himself in, trotted down the hall and burst unceremoniously into his room--not in the least disconcerted to find it empty, not, indeed, mindful that it might have been otherwise. His hat went one way, his handbag into a corner with a resounding bang. He sat himself down at his typewriter, quickly and deftly inserted a sheet of paper into the carriage and ... sat back at leisure, his gaze wandering dreamily out of the long, open windows, into the world of sunshine that shimmered over the back-yards.