Anthony Fry laid a kindly hand on his shoulder.
"Get back to bed, youngster," he smiled. "You're nervous, I suppose, being in a strange bed, and all that sort of thing. And incidentally, get off those clothes and give them to Wilkins."
David gulped audibly.
"I'll pass them out to Wilkins, if I must, sir," he said in the queerest, choking voice—and he turned from them and shuffled down the corridor to the north bedroom of Anthony Fry's apartment.
"Curious kid!" Anthony muttered.
"Not nearly as curious as you are," said Johnson Boller. "You didn't even go through his pockets and get out the stuff while he was here, and we could see just what he'd taken! You let him go in there and dump the pockets before he gives up the clothes and——"
Anthony permitted himself a grin and a yawn.
"My dear chap, go back to bed and forget it," he said impatiently. "The boy was stealing nothing. He may have been trying to escape; he may have been walking in his sleep. Consciously or subconsciously, he's certainly giving us a demonstration of humanity's tendency to dodge its opportunities."
Johnson Boller gave it up and returned, soured, to his Circassian walnut bedstead—soured because, if there was one thing above all others that he abominated, it was being routed out in the middle of the night.
Five minutes or more he spent in muttering before he drifted away again, this time to arrive at somebody's grand ball in Montreal. It was a tremendous function, plainly given in honor of Beatrice's arrival in town, yet she was not immediately visible. Johnson Boller's dream personality hunted around for some time before it found her in the conservatory.