—which was Margaret's—and bewildered to find that his hand had grown too large for it. The hostler of a boarding-stable directed him to a livery near by, and he succeeded in hiring a cab, though he had the feeling that he was speaking a foreign language and had difficulty in finding his words. The livery man understood the situation when Don, trying to pay in advance, found that the money he had in his hand was a wedding ring. "That's all right," the man grinned. "I been there. Put that in yer vest pocket an' ferget where it is." And he and the driver, having sympathetically helped Don to remember the address of Walter Pittsey's hotel, shut him in the cab and started the horses.
That drive was to remain in his memory as a smell of mildewed leather cushions and a sea-sickening darkness of rocking pitches, with street lights swimming by on the shores. He disembarked at a blazing hotel front and walked wide to the desk, over the black and white marble squares of a tessellated floor. Walter Pittsey was nowhere to be found. The clerk, after answering several futile questions, edged away from him and pretended to be busy looking up nothing in the telephone directory. Don wandered back to his cab, remembered Bert Pittsey, and gave the address to the driver on the box. He stood beside the front wheels until the man said: "Yes'ur. Jus' get inside now an' we'll start. See yuh shut the door."
It followed, naturally, that Don held the door shut until the cab had stopped at Pittsey's number. Then, alighting from the door which he had been holding, he found himself in the middle of the street, and had difficulty in distinguishing the house.
