He found a yesterday’s paper in the office of the hotel, and read it till he began to drowse over it, when he pulled himself up with a sharp jerk. He discovered that it was now six o’clock, and he thought if he could walk about for an hour he might return to St. Johnswort, and worry through the remaining hour till breakfast somehow. He was still framing in his thoughts some sort of statement concerning the apparition which he should make when the largest number of guests had got together at the table, with a fine question whether he should take them between the cantaloupe and the broiled chicken, or wait till they had come to the corn griddle-cakes, which St. John’s cook served of a filigree perfection in homage to the good old American breakfast ideal. There would be more women, if he waited, and he should need the sympathy and countenance of women; his story would be wanting in something of its supreme effect without the electrical response of their keener nerves. II. When Hewson came up to the cottage he was sensible of a certain agitation in the air, which was intensified to him by the sight of St. John, in his bare, bald head and the négligé of a flannel housecoat, inspecting, with the gardener and one of the grooms, the fallen trellis under the library window, which from time to time they looked up at, as they talked. Hewson made haste to join them, through the garden gate, and to say shamefacedly enough, “Oh, I’m afraid I’m responsible for that,” and he told how he must have thrown down the trellis in getting out of the window. “Oh!” said St. John, while the two men walked away with dissatisfied grins at being foiled of their sensation. “We thought it was burglars. I’m so glad it was only you.” But in spite of his profession, St. John did not give Hewson any very lively proof of his enjoyment. “Deuced uncomfortable to have had one’s guests murdered in their beds. Don’t say anything about it, please, Hewson. The women would all fly the premises, if there’d been even a suspicion of burglars.” “Oh, no; I won’t,” Hewson willingly assented; but he perceived a disappointment in St. John’s tone and manner, and he suspected him, however unjustly, of having meant to give himself importance with his guests by the rumor of a burglary in the house. He was a man quite capable of that, Hewson believed, and failing it, capable of pretending that he wanted the matter hushed up in the interest of others. In any case he saw that it was not to St. John primarily, or secondarily to St. John’s guests, that he could celebrate the fact of his apparition. In the presence of St. John’s potential vulgarity he keenly felt his own, and he recoiled from what he had imagined doing. He even realized that he would have been working St. John an injury by betraying his house to his guests as the scene of a supernatural incident.