But sleep refused to come at the young man’s call; his throat was burning, his mouth dry as a bone. Drink he must at all costs to quench the fire that consumed him, to mitigate these painful and inevitable consequences of his over indulgence in the generous wines of the night before. Screwing up his courage to the needful effort, slowly, painfully, moving like an automaton, Ascott sat up in bed, clasped his damp brow, then slipped one leg from between the sheets; the other followed, his naked feet shivering as they touched the bedside mat. Catching a glimpse of a dressing gown lying within reach on a chair, he put it on with the cross and sulky looks of an ill-used martyr. “That beast of a John,” he was thinking, “by forgetting to put my water ready last night will have made me ill for the rest of the day!” Stumbling across the room, his eyes still only half open, Ascott made for the dressing room adjoining his bedroom, in which he felt sure—at least he hoped so—of finding a supply of clear, fresh water that should revive his energies depressed by the consumption of unlimited alcoholic liquors and liqueurs. He opened the door of his bathroom, but on the point of entering, he stopped dead on the threshold, dumbfounded by what he saw, albeit with a very vague and confused comprehension of the apparition that met his gaze! The room, generally so neat and tidy and meticulously ordered, every crystal phial and pomatum pot and toilet article in its appointed place on the dressing table, was this morning in the wildest disorder. There were bottles without stoppers giving out heady perfumes, brushes scattered about the floor, towels tossed at random over the backs of chairs. But what above all else surprised the young man and filled him with the most intense amazement was to see on the Louis Seize settee, where he often threw himself after his bath to be massaged by his servant man to restore his numbed limbs to their proper suppleness, a woman lying there, half undressed and her hair undone, curled up on the couch buried in heavy, but restless slumbers. Her clothes, her skirt, her bodice lay about the floor, her shoes lay one in a corner cheek by jowl with a copper kettle, the other precariously perched on the shelf of a what-not! Ascott had no need to look twice to recognize the sleeper. It was Nini Guinon, old Moche’s niece, the girl he had dined with yesterday evening in the private room ... who at the close of the entertainment when her uncle went away, had been left alone with him, ... whom he had made his mistress!