At a quarter before seven, for the first time, Minot entered Mr. Tom Stacy's Manhattan Club and Grill. To any one who crossed Mr. Stacy's threshold with the expectation of immediately encountering lights and gaiety, the first view of the interior came as a distinct shock. The main dining-room of the Manhattan Club was dim with the holy dimness of a cathedral. Its lamps, hung high, were buried in oriental trappings, and shone half-heartedly. Faintly through the gloom could be discerned white table-cloths, gleaming silver. The scene demanded hushed voices, noiseless footsteps. It got both. The main dining-room was hollowed out of the center of the great stone building, and its roof was off in the dark three stories above. On each side of the entrance, stairways led to second and third-floor balconies which stretched around the room on three sides. From these balconies doors opened into innumerable rooms--rooms where lights shone brighter, and from which the chief of police, when he came to make certain financial arrangements with Mr. Stacy, heard frequently a gentle click-click. It may have been that the furnishings of the main dining-room and the balconies were there before Mr. Stacy's coming, or again they may have set forth his own idea of suitable decoration. Looking about him, Mr. Minot was reminded of a play like _Sumurun_ after three hard seasons on the road. Moth-eaten rugs and musty tapestries hung everywhere. Here and there an atrocious cozy corner belied its name. Iron lanterns gave parsimonious light. Aged sofa-pillows lay limply. "Oriental," Mr. Stacy would have called the effect. Here in this dim, but scarcely religious light, the patrons of his "grill" ate their food, being not without misgivings as they stared through the gloom at their plates. The long tables for the Harrowby dinner were already set, and about them hovered waiters of a color to match the room. Most of the guests had arrived. Mr. Paddock made it a point to introduce Mr. Minot at once to the Duchess of Lismore. This noble lady with the packing-house past was making a commendable effort to lighten the Manhattan Club by a wonderful display of jewels. "Then felt I like some watcher of the skies, when a new planet swims into his ken," whispered Minot, as the duchess moved away. Paddock laughed. "A dowdy little woman by day, but a pillar of fire by night," he agreed. "By the way, I'm foreman of her composing-room, beginning to-morrow." "Be careful, Jack," Minot warned. "A double life from now on," Paddock replied, "but I think I can get away with it. Say, for ways that are dark this man Stacy seems to hold a better hand than the heathen Chinee." In one corner the portly Spencer Meyrick was orating to a circle of young people on the evils of gambling. Minot turned away, smiling cynically. Meyrick, as everybody knew, had made a large part of his fortune in Wall Street.