Then I quietly stepped outside and closed the door, leaving them alone. From that moment I was an outsider, an intruder. My part was over and done. But the sight of those two young people, in each other's arms, made my thoughts turn back to Mary Lockwood and the happiness which had been lost out of my own life. And I didn't sleep so well that night as I had hoped to. CHAPTER VI THE IRREPROACHABLE BUTLER "Are you waiting for some one, sir?" That question, for all its veneer of respectfulness, was only too patently a message of dismissal. And I resented it, not only because it was an impertinence, but more because it had driven out of my drowsy brain a very beautiful picture of Mary Lockwood as she stooped over an old Italian table-cover embroidered with gold galloon. "Are you waiting for some one?" repeated that newly arrived all-night waiter, in no way impressed by my silence. "I am," I announced as I inspected him with open disapproval. I was dreamily wondering why, in the name of common sense, waiters always dressed in such ridiculous and undecorative neckties. This particular waiter, however, continued to regard me out of a fishy and cynical eye. Then he looked at the clock. Then he looked at my empty wine-cooler, plainly an advertisement of suspended circulation in the only fluid that seemed vital to him. "Was it a lady?" he had the effrontery to inquire. I could see his eyes roam about the all but empty room. It was the low-ebb hour when a trolley car is an event along the empty street, the hour when chairs are piled on café tables, the white corpuscles of the milk wagons begin to move through the city's sleepy arteries, and those steel nerves known as telegraph wires keep languidly awake with the sugary thrills of their night letters. "Yes, it was a lady," I answered. That wall-eyed intruder knew nothing of the heavenly supper I had stumbled on in that wicked French restaurant, or of the fine and firm _Clos Vougeot_ that had been unearthed from its shabby cellar, or of my own peace of mind as I sat there studying the empty metal cooler and pondering how the mean and scabby wastes of Champagne could mother an ichor so rich with singing etherealities. "Er--just what might she look like, sir?" my tormentor next asked of me, blinking about in a loose and largely condoning matter-of-factness as though in placid search of some plumed and impatient demirep awaiting her chance to cross the bar of acquaintanceship on the careless high tide of inebriacy. "She moves very, very quietly, and has a star in her hair," I replied to that fish-eyed waiter. "Her breath is soft and dewy, and her brow is hooded. And in her hands she carries a spray of poppies." The waiter looked down at me with that impersonal mild pity with which it is man's wont to view the harmlessly insane.