Claude was silent for a while. His father, watching him keenly and sympathetically, supposed him to be in the throes of a fierce emotional contest between his sense of duty and his love for Janet. Claude was under the same delusion. In reality, the willful force that swayed him was not so much inclining him to marry Janet as pushing him not to marry Marjorie. For the moment, the easiest course to pursue was to yield on the minor issue and gain time on the major one. He would give up the evening with Janet and go to Huntington, but he would refrain from committing himself definitely as regards Marjorie and marriage. "I’ll be in Huntington for dinner, father," he said briefly. Mr. Fontaine, greatly relieved, patted his son’s back affectionately and walked away with a satisfied smile. *V* That evening, just before the theatres opened, a tall, thin man in a taupe-colored flannel suit and a soft beaver hat came out of the Commodore Hotel walked westward along Forty-second Street, and took an uptown bus at Fifth Avenue. Mark Pryor, in a very unprofessional mood, had the air of one who is determined to be seen rather than to see. Considering the constant use he made of his knack of fading out of his surroundings to the point of almost total invisibility, this was not as easy for him as it sounds. Easy or not, it was his mood. Mr. Pryor, whose gift for self-effacement amounted to a miracle, needed a change. And he sought it by trying to make himself manifest, as other people seek it by trying to hide. He had not deserted Kips Bay. But the growing inquisitiveness of his neighbors, and particularly of the acquaintances he had struck up in flat Number Fifteen, had driven him to the expedient of running two domiciles and of dividing his time between them. The choice of a room in a first-class hotel had been dictated not by a craving for luxury but by a sense of domestic propriety. "There are two things I can’t live without," he had once told Robert Lloyd. "One is an unfailing supply of hot water, the other is perfect freedom to come and go as I choose. A man can always get these treasures among the model poor or the unmodel rich, but never in a middle-class home." Robert had heartily endorsed this sentiment without any suspicion that Mr. Pryor—whom some of the Outlaws suspected of being a fugitive counterfeiter and others of being a shrinking novelist in search of local color—perambulated from an army cot in his Lorillard flat to a Circassian walnut bedstead in the Commodore Hotel. On the evening in question, Mr. Pryor decided to explore a section of Manhattan which he had hitherto neglected. Accordingly he boarded a cross-town bus going east and alighted at the corner of Second Avenue and Seventy-second Street.