Clavering found himself in the largest room of the large suite of rooms he occupied at the most expensive hotel in Washington. The April sun was just setting, and it flamed upon a huge mirror directly opposite the luxurious chair in which he sat. He looked at his own image reflected full length in the glass. It seemed to be moving, to be surrounded by other figures. He saw them well—painted and bedizened women, some of them loaded with jewels and with coronets on their heads. Their faces were beautiful and engaging and made his pulses leap, and then suddenly these faces changed into those of vultures with bloody beaks and hungry eyes. Then there were men, some in court dress and with orders sparkling on their breasts. All of them had a foreign look, they spoke a language he only half understood; and they too changed into hungry, distorted figures which he knew were the shapes of vampires and harpies. They smiled upon him and fawned upon him, and he saw himself smiling back, rather pleased, it appeared. Sometimes he and this crowd were moving through splendid rooms; there were balls and dinners going on, and he could hear the clash and rhythm of orchestras. Again, they were in dismal business offices, or in raging crowds upon Continental bourses. At first he was always surrounded, and it seemed as if he were losing something all the time. Gradually the men and women about him no longer fawned upon him. They were familiar with him; then they jeered him; and presently they menaced him. They tried to strangle him, to rob him, and he had lost something—money or power or capacity, or perhaps all three, and he could not defend himself. And they grew more and more foreign to him, he could not understand their language at all. They talked among themselves, and he did not know what they were saying. And after a while he grew helpless, and did not know where he was; and then he saw himself standing on a bridge at night, in a foreign city. There were many lights upon the bridge, which were reflected in the black and rushing river. He was about to throw himself into the river, when it suddenly came to him that it was cold and he was thinly clad and hungry. And then he knew that he was in a strange country, and it came to him that he would return to his own land, to a place where there was warmth and comfort and the strange thing he had lost would be awaiting him. But then he heard wolfish voices shrieking at him out of the darkness that he had no home, no country—that he would never again be warmed and fed, and invisible hands like lions’ claws were clutching him and thrusting him into the dark waters, and he could only feebly resist them. There was a great mocking, reddish moon in the wild night sky and it reeled about and fell into an abyss of black clouds and then dropped into the blacker river. And the stars were going out one by one, so that the heavens and the earth had a blackness of the blackest night.