“If you would be so kind?” she said simply. “It's in the small cupboard---the brown one--Sargent, you have the key?” “Oh, yes, Rose.” Mr. Piper was looking, Oliver thought, rather more embarrassed than it was fair for any man to have to look and live. His eyes kept going pitifully and always to Mrs. Severance and then creeping, away. He produced the key, however, and gave it to Oliver silently and Oliver took the first opportunity when he was through the curtains of giving whatever fates had presided over the insanities of the evening a long cheer with nine Mrs. Severances on the end. He carefully stayed in the kitchen fifteen minutes--devoting most of the time to a cautious examination of Ted, who seemed to be gradually recovering consciousness. At least he stirred a little when poked by Oliver's foot. “Sleeps just like a baby--oh, the sweet little fellow--the dear little fellow--” hummed Oliver wildly as he made a few last additions to the curious network of string and towels with which he had wound Ted into the fire-escape as if he had been making him a cocoon. “Well--well--_well_--what a night we're having! What a night we're having and what _will_ we have next?” Then he remembered the reason for his journey and removed a bottle of brandy from the brown cup-board, found appropriate glasses and, in the ice-chest, club-soda and ginger ale. He poured himself a drink reminiscent of Paris--not that he felt he needed it for the reaction from bracing himself to die like a Pythias had left him elvishly grotesque in mind--gathered the bottles tenderly in his arms like small glass babies and went back to the living-room. XLI And this time he was forced to pay internal high compliment to Mr. Piper as well as to Mrs. Severance. The pitiful grey image, its knees rumpled from the floor, its features streaked like a cheap paper mask with ludicrous dreadful tears, had turned back into the President of the Commercial Bank with branches in Bombay and Melbourne and all the business-capitals of the world. Not that Mr. Piper was at ease again, exactly--to be at ease under the circumstances would merely have proved him brightly inhuman--but he looked as Oliver thought he might have on one of the Street's Black Mondays when only complete firmness and complete audacity in one could keep even the Commercial afloat at a time when the Stock Exchange had turned into a floor-full of well-dressed maniacs and houses that everyone had thought as solid as granite went to pieces like sand castles. Oliver set down the bottles and opened them with a feeling both that he had never known Mr. Piper at all before, only Peter's father, and, spookily, that neither Peter's father nor the terrible old man who had wept on the floor beside Mrs. Severance could have any real existence--this was such a complete and unemotional Mr. Piper he had before him, a Mr. Piper, too, in spite of all the oddities of the present situation, so obviously at home in his own house.