At half-past nine Dulcie took a last look at the pictures on the dresser, turned out the light, and skipped into bed.  It’s an awful thing to go to bed with a good-night look at General Kitchener, William Muldoon, the Duchess of Marlborough, and Benvenuto Cellini.  This story really doesn’t get anywhere at all.  The rest of it comes later—­sometime when Piggy asks Dulcie again to dine with him, and she is feeling lonelier than usual, and General Kitchener happens to be looking the other way; and then—­

As I said before, I dreamed that I was standing near a crowd of prosperous-looking angels, and a policeman took me by the wing and asked if I belonged with them.

“Who are they?” I asked.

“Why,” said he, “they are the men who hired working-girls, and paid ’em five or six dollars a week to live on.  Are you one of the bunch?”

“Not on your immortality,” said I.  “I’m only the fellow that set fire to an orphan asylum, and murdered a blind man for his pennies.”

THE CALIPH, CUPID AND THE CLOCK

Prince Michael, of the Electorate of Valleluna, sat on his favourite bench in the park.  The coolness of the September night quickened the life in him like a rare, tonic wine.  The benches were not filled; for park loungers, with their stagnant blood, are prompt to detect and fly home from the crispness of early autumn.  The moon was just clearing the roofs of the range of dwellings that bounded the quadrangle on the east.  Children laughed and played about the fine-sprayed fountain.  In the shadowed spots fauns and hamadryads wooed, unconscious of the gaze of mortal eyes.  A hand organ—­Philomel by the grace of our stage carpenter, Fancy—­fluted and droned in a side street.  Around the enchanted boundaries of the little park street cars spat and mewed and the stilted trains roared like tigers and lions prowling for a place to enter.  And above the trees shone the great, round, shining face of an illuminated clock in the tower of an antique public building.

Prince Michael’s shoes were wrecked far beyond the skill of the carefullest cobbler.  The ragman would have declined any negotiations concerning his clothes.  The two weeks’ stubble on his face was grey and brown and red and greenish yellow—­as if it had been made up from individual contributions from the chorus of a musical comedy.  No man existed who had money enough to wear so bad a hat as his.

Prince Michael sat on his favourite bench and smiled.  It was a diverting thought to him that he was wealthy enough to buy every one of those close-ranged, bulky, window-lit mansions that faced him, if he chose.  He could have matched gold, equipages, jewels, art treasures, estates and acres with any Croesus in this proud city of Manhattan, and scarcely have entered upon the bulk of his holdings.  He could have sat at table with reigning sovereigns.  The social world, the world of art, the fellowship of the elect,