Yet he took a certain comfort in Krantz's companionship in the morning, as from the crowded ferry he watched the city's sky line detach itself from the mist. Notwithstanding his legislative career, New York was almost an unknown country, and this battlemented mystery overawed him like a frowning bastion. It challenged the alien to do and dare, but it quenched his individuality. Krantz, obviously, was hardened to its lesson. He elbowed the jostling pack in the ferry slip as one of them, called the elevated road the "L," and was otherwise enviably sophisticated. Shelby imitated at a distance, but the hall mark of the outsider was too deep for ready erasure. He would persistently apologize to people with whom he collided, and surrender his car seat to standing women. He had mentioned a Madison Square hotel as his destination, and on Krantz's saying that he meant to stop there briefly, too, it fell out that they approached the room clerk together, and that Krantz registered for both. So it chanced that, unknown to himself, the candidate was entered with a fine flourish as the Hon. Calvin Ross Shelby. The two men breakfasted together, and Krantz presently went about his business, leaving Shelby in some quandary how he should employ the interval before the hour appointed by the great leader for their meeting. For a time he loitered in a window overlooking the restful oasis of the square, a place of fountains and pleasant leafage, dominated by a graceful tower which served as footstool for a shining goddess on tiptoe to greet the morning. His eyes were not long bent upon the goddess,--he did not "live with the gods,"--nor yet upon the greenness, since he had lived all his days with shrubs and trees; he watched the commingling ride of Broadway and Fifth Avenue, watched till it dizzied and saddened him. What did he count here? Presently he returned to the desk with an inquiry concerning his room. There had been a shift of clerks since his arrival, and the newcomer asked his name, his impassive scrutiny travelling from the man to the signature, and from the signature back to the man. A youngish person, looking the successful broker or lawyer, who had been chatting with the clerk, saw the movement and imitated it as Shelby walked away. "And you said there were no celebrities," he bantered. The clerk shrugged listlessly. "The 'Hon. Calvin Ross Shelby,'" read the reporter. "There ought to be a story in a man who has the nerve to subscribe himself like that in a New York hotel. What do you know about his pathetic case?" "Stranger to me," the bored one unbent to say. The questioner spied a fellow-reporter whose specialty was politics. "Billy," he demanded, pointing to the register, "who is the Hon. Calvin Ross Shelby?"