a night of it. Anything would be better than this—disgrace, imprisonment, even death. She would crawl out, wake the man, and try and explain as best she could.

She would switch on the light, cough, and say: ‘Monsieur!’

Then he would start up and stare at her.

Then she would say—what should she say?

‘Pardon, monsieur, mais je—’ What on earth was the French for ‘I have made a mistake.’

‘J’ai tort. C’est la chambre—er—incorrect. Voulez-vous—er—’

What was the French for ‘door-knob,’ ‘let me go’?

It didn’t matter. She would turn on the light, cough and trust to luck. If he got out of bed, and came toward her, she would scream the hotel down. …

The resolution formed, she crawled deliberately out at the foot of the bed. She scrambled hastily toward the door—a perilous journey. In a few seconds the room was flooded with light. She turned toward the bed, coughed, and cried out boldly:

‘Monsieur!’

Then, for the third time that night, little Miss Bracegirdle’s heart all but stopped. In this case the climax of the horror took longer to develop, but when it was reached, it clouded the other two experiences into insignificance.

The man on the bed was dead!

She had never beheld death before, but one does not mistake death.

She stared at him bewildered, and repeated almost in a whisper:

‘Monsieur! … Monsieur!

Then she tiptoed toward the bed. The hair and moustache looked extraordinarily black in that grey, wax- like setting. The mouth was slightly open, and the face, which in life might have been vicious and sensual, looked incredibly peaceful and far away. It was as though she were regarding the features of a man across some vast passage of time, a being who had always been completely remote from mundane preoccupations.

When the full truth came home to her, little Miss Bracegirdle buried her face in her hands and murmured:

‘Poor fellow … poor fellow!’

For the moment her own position seemed an affair of small consequence. She was in the presence of something greater and more all-pervading. Almost instinctively she knelt by the bed and prayed.

For a few moments she seemed to be possessed by an extraordinary calmness and detachment. The burden of her hotel predicament was a gossamer trouble—a silly, trivial, almost comic episode, something that could be explained away.

But this man—he had lived his life, whatever it was like, and now he was in the presence of his Maker. What kind of man had he been?