HORACE Boyce was too enraged to preserve a polite demeanor toward the sympathizers who had followed him out of the hall, and who showed a disposition to discuss the situation with him now the street was reached. After a muttered word or two to Tenney, the young man abruptly turned his back on the group, and walked with a hurried step down the street toward his hotel. Entering the building, he made his way direct to the bar-room back of the office--a place where he had rarely been before--and poured out for himself a heavy portion of whiskey, which he drank off without noticing the glass of iced water placed for him beside the bottle. He turned to go, but came back again to the bar after he had reached the swinging screen-doors, and said he would take a bottle of the liquor up to his room. “I haven’t been sleeping well these last few nights,” he explained to the bar-keeper. Once in his room, Horace put off his boots, got into easy coat and slippers, raked down the fire, looked for an aimless minute or two at the row of books on his shelf, and then threw himself into the arm-chair beside the stove. The earlier suggestion of gray in his hair at the temples had grown more marked these last few weeks, and there were new lines of care on his clear-cut face, which gave it a haggard look now as he bent his brows in rumination. An important interview with Tenney and Wendover was to take place in this room a half hour later; but, besides a certain hard-drawn notion that he would briskly hold his own with them, Horace did not try to form plans for this or even to fasten his mind upon it. The fortnight or more that had passed since that terrible momentary vision of Kate Minster running up the stairs to avoid him, had been to the young man a period of unexampled gloominess and unrest, full of deep wrath at the fate which had played upon him such a group of scurvy tricks all at once, yet having room for sustained exasperation over the minor discomforts of his new condition. The quarrel with his father had forced him to change his residence, and this was a peculiarly annoying circumstance coming at just such a time. He realized now that he had been very comfortable in the paternal house, and that his was a temperament extremely dependent upon well-ordered and satisfactory surroundings. These new rooms of his, though they cost a good deal of money, were not at all to his liking, and the service was execrable. The sense of being at home was wholly lacking; he felt as disconnected and out of touch with the life about him as if he had been travelling in a foreign country which he did not like.