Guinevere and Hinton stood on the upper deck under his umbrella and waited. Directly below them on the dock a small, fantastic figure made frantic efforts to attract their attention. He stood uncovered, regardless of the rain, madly waving his hat. "Is that anybody you know?" asked Hinton. Guinevere, who was watching the lights on the water, started guiltily. "Where?" she asked. "Down to the right--that comical little codger in the checked suit." Guinevere looked, then turned upon Hinton eyes that were big with indignation. "Why, of course," she said; "that's Mr. Opp." XI As Willard Hinton stood on the porch of Your Hotel and waited for his host for the night to call for him, he was in that state of black dejection that comes to a young man when Ambition has proposed to Fortune, and been emphatically rejected. For six years he had worked persistently and ceaselessly toward a given goal, doing clerical work by day and creative work by night, going from shorthand into longhand, and from numerical figures into figures of speech. For the way that Hinton's soul was traveling was the Inky Way, and at its end lay Authorship. Hinton had taken himself and his work seriously, and served an apprenticeship of hard study and conscientious preparation. So zealous was he, in fact, that he had arrived at the second stage of his great enterprise with a teeming brain, a practised hand, and a pair of affected eyes over which the oculists shook their heads and offered little encouragement. For four months he had implicitly obeyed orders, attending only to his regular work, eating and sleeping with exemplary regularity, and spending all of his spare time in the open air. But the ravages made in the long nights dedicated to the Muses were not to be so easily repaired, and his eyes, instead of improving, were growing rapidly worse. The question of holding his position had slipped from a matter of months into weeks. As he stood on the porch, he could hear the bustle of entertainment going on within the limited quarters of Your Hotel. Jimmy Fallows was in his element. As bartender, head waiter, and jovial landlord he was playing a triple bill to a crowded house. Occasionally he opened the door and urged Hinton to come inside. "Mr. Opp'll be here 'fore long," he would say. "He's expecting you, but he had to stop by to take his girl home. You better step in and get a julep."