Peter closed the book and laid it aside, and finished his luncheon in a daze.
One thing stood forth in his mind. He must take time to think—think deeply, carefully, before he did anything. He must get away by himself and meet this strange, new emergency that had come to him.
What to do, how to conduct himself, these were questions of gravest import, and not to be lightly settled.
He thought quickly, and concluded that for a secure hiding-place a man could do no better than choose a big city hotel.
Finishing his meal he went to the desk and asked for a room, registering as John Harrison, which was the name by which he had been known on the ship that had brought him to port.
Once behind the locked door of his room he threw himself into an armchair and devoured the book he had bought.
Rapidly he flew through it; then went over it again, more slowly, until Peter Boots was familiar with every chapter of the book that his father had written in his memory.
Memory! And he wasn't dead!
The book, he saw, had gone through a large number of editions, wherefore, many people had read the tale of his tragic fate in the Labrador wild, and of his recrudescence and communications with his parents, and now, here he was reading it himself.
It is not easy to realize how strange it must seem to read not only one's own death notices but the accounts of one's return to earth in spirit form, and to be informed of the astonishing things one said and did through the kind offices of a professional medium!