After the swift handshake the door closed on the enraptured young man, and the hard, characterless street, down which he seemed to dance, became transformed into a moonlit glade of fairyland. It was four o’clock in the morning when he entered his back-bedroom at the Vanloo Hotel. But he did not sleep. He had no desire for sleep—youth resenting the veil drawn across a consciousness so exquisitely alive. Sleep, when the stars in their courses were fighting for him? Impossible, preposterous! Let him rather live, again and again, over the night’s crowded adventure. Every detail of it set his pulses throbbing. The mere glorious first recognition of her was the thrill of a lifetime. He constructed and reconstructed the immortal picture. The moonlit, silent street, its high, decorous buildings marked by the feeble gas lamps melting into an indeterminate vanishing point. The clear-cut scene. The taxi-cab. The three human figures. The stunted driver. The massive, dark man, in silk hat which reflected the moonlight, in black overcoat thrown open, revealing a patch of white shirt and waistcoat; the slender, quivering, white form draped in white fur, white gossamer, white what-not, crowned with dark glory of eyes and hair. The masculine in him exulted in his physical strength and skill—in the clean, straight, elementary yet scientific left-hander that got the hulking swine between the eyes and sent him reeling and sprawling and asking for no more punishment. And then—oh, it was a great thing to command, to impose his will. To walk in triumph off with the wonderful lady of his dreams. To feel, as she thanked him, that here was something definite that he had done for her, something with a touch of the romantic, the heroic, which, in its trivial way, justified belief in the incidents of his adventurous career which he had so modestly, yet so vividly described in the book that had brought him fame.