“This man should be arrested,” Cowperwood protested, vigorously, when the latter appeared. “He has grossly insulted lady guests of mine. He is drunk and disorderly, and I wish to make that charge. Here is my card. Will you let me know where to come?” He handed it over, while Braxmar, scrutinizing the stranger with military care, added: “I should like to thrash you within an inch of your life. If you weren’t drunk I would. If you are a gentleman and have a card I want you to give it to me. I want to talk to you later.” He leaned over and presented a cold, hard face to that of Mr. Beales Chadsey, of Louisville, Kentucky. “Tha’s all right, Captain,” leered Chadsey, mockingly. “I got a card. No harm done. Here you are. You c’n see me any time you want—Hotel Buckingham, Fifth Avenue and Fiftieth Street. I got a right to speak to anybody I please, where I please, when I please. See?” He fumbled and protested while the officer stood by read to take him in charge. Not finding a card, he added: “Tha’s all right. Write it down. Beales Chadsey, Hotel Buckingham, or Louisville, Kentucky. See me any time you want to. Tha’s Hattie Starr. She knows me. I couldn’t make a mistake about her—not once in a million. Many’s the night I spent in her house.” Braxmar was quite ready to lunge at him had not the officer intervened. Back in the dining-room Berenice and her mother were sitting, the latter quite flustered, pale, distrait, horribly taken aback—by far too much distressed for any convincing measure of deception. “Why, the very idea!” she was saying. “That dreadful man! How terrible! I never saw him before in my life.” Berenice, disturbed and nonplussed, was thinking of the familiar and lecherous leer with which the stranger had addressed her mother—the horror, the shame of it. Could even a drunken man, if utterly mistaken, be so defiant, so persistent, so willing to explain? What shameful things had she been hearing? “Come, mother,” she said, gently, and with dignity; “never mind, it is all right. We can go home at once. You will feel better when you are out of here.” She called a waiter and asked him to say to the gentlemen that they had gone to the women’s dressing-room. She pushed an intervening chair out of the way and gave her mother her arm. “To think I should be so insulted,” Mrs. Carter mumbled on, “here in a great hotel, in the presence of Lieutenant Braxmar and Mr. Cowperwood! This is too dreadful. Well, I never.”