When he was shown to his sitting-room on the eighth floor, he saw at a glance that everything was as it should be; there was but one detail in his mental picture that the place did not realize, so he rang for the bell boy and sent him down for flowers.  He moved about nervously until the boy returned, putting away his new linen and fingering it delightedly as he did so.  When the flowers came, he put them hastily into water, and then tumbled into a hot bath.  Presently he came out of his white bath-room, resplendent in his new silk underwear, and playing with the tassels of his red robe.  The snow was whirling so fiercely outside his windows that he could scarcely see across the street; but within, the air was deliciously soft and fragrant.  He put the violets and jonquils on the tabouret beside the couch, and threw himself down with a long sigh, covering himself with a Roman blanket.  He was thoroughly tired; he had been in such haste, he had stood up to such a strain, covered so much ground in the last twenty-four hours, that he wanted to think how it had all come about.  Lulled by the sound of the wind, the warm air, and the cool fragrance of the flowers, he sank into deep, drowsy retrospection.

It had been wonderfully simple; when they had shut him out of the theatre and concert hall, when they had taken away his bone, the whole thing was virtually determined.  The rest was a mere matter of opportunity.  The only thing that at all surprised him was his own courage—­for he realized well enough that he had always been tormented by fear, a sort of apprehensive dread that, of late years, as the meshes of the lies he had told closed about him, had been pulling the muscles of his body tighter and tighter.  Until now, he could not remember a time when he had not been dreading something.  Even when he was a little boy, it was always there—­behind him, or before, or on either side.  There had always been the shadowed corner, the dark place into which he dared not look, but from which something seemed always to be watching him—­and Paul had done things that were not pretty to watch, he knew.

But now he had a curious sense of relief, as though he had at last thrown down the gauntlet to the thing in the corner.

Yet it was but a day since he had been sulking in the traces; but yesterday afternoon that he had been sent to the bank with Denny & Carson’s deposit, as usual—­but this time he was instructed to leave the book to be balanced.  There was above two thousand dollars in checks, and nearly a thousand in the bank notes which he had taken from the book and quietly transferred to his pocket.  At the bank he had made out a new deposit slip.  His nerves had been steady enough to permit of his returning to the office, where he had finished his work and asked for a full day’s holiday tomorrow, Saturday, giving a perfectly reasonable pretext.  The bank book, he knew, would not be returned before Monday or Tuesday, and his father would be out of town for the next week.  From the time he slipped the bank notes into his pocket until he boarded the night train for New York, he had not known a moment’s hesitation.