The glamour of
the night was gone and with it all that had lent semblance of
plausibility to his incredible career; daylight forced all back into
confused and distorted perspective, like the pageant of some fantastic
and disordered dream uncertainly recalled long hours after waking.
As for himself, in his absurd attire and bound upon his ambiguous
errand, he was all out of the picture--horribly suggestive of an
addled sparrow who had stayed up all night on purpose to cheat some
legitimately early bird out of a chimerical first worm....
Self-conscious and ill at ease, he presented himself to the amused
inspection of the night force in the office of the Plaza, made his
halting enquiry, and received the discounted assurance that Miss
Blessington, though a known and valued patron of the house, was not
then its guest.
Convinced, as he had been from the moment that the words "two-thirty,"
falling from the lips of the Bizarre's house detective, had made him
alive to his terrible oversight, that this would be the outcome at the
Plaza, he turned away, sobered, outwitted, and miserably at a loss to
guess what next to do.
Gloomily he paused with a hand on the open door of his car, thoughts
profoundly disturbed and unsettled, for so long that the operator grew
restless.
"Where next, sir?" he asked.
"Wait," said P. Sybarite in a manner of abstraction that did him no
injustice; and entering the car, mechanically shut the door and sat
down, permitting his gaze to range absently among the dusky distances
of Central Park; where through the netted, leafless branches, the
lamps that march the winding pathways glimmered like a hundred tiny
moons of gold lost in some vast purple well.
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