He had no doubts of the morrow, but these troubling remembrances came blurringly across the crystal of his brain.
Abruptly he took up his telephone and rang his house number. "Yamuro," he said when he heard the sibilant, quaintly distorted voice of the Japanese from the other end, "ask Mr. Paul to wait for me there until I come in." Paul's music should soothe him.
"'Scuse, please," came the apologetic reply. "Mr. Paul, she no here. When she come, Yamuro tell. Thanks."
It was late when the financier left his car at his own door and demanded of Harrow, "Where is my brother?"
"In the music-room, I think, sir." Hamilton thought he detected in the butler's voice a note of anxiety and for a moment he glanced with a keen scrutiny into the servitor's eyes, and the eyes dropped under his gaze.
"Very well, I sha'n't need you again tonight." The Titan turned and climbed the stairs.
The lights of the music-room were burning brilliantly and on a table stood siphons and bottles and glasses. At the door Hamilton paused and glanced uneasily about, then he saw Paul, and smiled. Weary with his vigil Paul, the affectionate and faithful, had evidently fallen asleep in his chair. Hamilton crossed and laid a hand on his brother's shoulder. Then as quickly he withdrew it. Something unaccustomed in the younger man's appearance arrested him and he stood gazing down.
The musician sprawled in an attitude of demoralized inertia and over his cameo face the dark hair hung disordered. His hands fell grotesquely and his closed eyes were puffed. Hamilton bent down and with a low oath studied his brother. His sleep was no natural napping. It was a drunken stupor proclaiming itself in a stertorous and uneasy breathing.
Angrily Hamilton shook the sagging shoulders until the sleeper's lids opened heavily and the lips voiced some incoherent thing. Then Paul attempted to turn his face away and go to sleep again.
"So," exclaimed the elder as he dragged his brother to his feet and restored him to a semblance of consciousness, "so this is the way you waited for me?"