"Before I had decided what to do he was back again in my studio looking like a different man. Not only had he been fed, but he was clean-shaven and clean-collared.
"'I took you at your word,' he said. 'I had a bath and bought me a clean collar. Here is the change,' and he handed me back some silver. 'I don't want to promise anything I can't do, and I don't say I'll pay it back, for I may not be able to, but I'll try my best to do so. Good-by, and thank you again.'
"'Hold on,' I said. 'Sit down, and let me talk to you.' Now right here, gentlemen, I want to tell you"—Woods swept his eye around the circle as he spoke, then rose to his feet as if to give greater emphasis to what he was about to say, his round bullet-head, eye-glasses, and immaculate shirt collar glistening in the overhead light—"I want to tell you right here that the buying of that clean collar and the return of the change settled the matter for me. I'm a student of human nature, as most of you know, and I have certain fixed rules to guide me which never fail. My duty was clear; I would play the Good Samaritan for all I was worth. I wouldn't cross over and ask him how the cripple was getting on; I'd walk down both sides of the street, call an ambulance, lift him in to a down-covered cot run on C springs, and trundle him off to flowery beds of ease or whatever else I could scrape up that was comforting. Now listen—and, Mac, I want you to take all this in, for I am telling this yarn for your special benefit.
"That same afternoon I took him up to my rooms—I was living with my aunt then up on Murray Hill—opened up my wardrobe, pulled out a shirt, underwear, socks, shoes, cut-away coat, waistcoat, and trousers; gave him a scarf, and then to add a touch to his whole get-up I picked a scarf-pin from my cushion and stuck it in myself. Next I handed him a cigar, opened up a bottle of Scotch, and after dinner—my aunt was dining out, and we had the table to ourselves—sat up with him till near midnight, he and I talking together like any other two men who had met for the first time and who had, to their delight, found something in common.
"Nor would any of you have known the difference had you happened to drop in upon us. No reference, of course, was made to his condition or to the way in which we had met. He was clean, well-dressed, well-mannered, perfectly at ease, and entirely at home. You could see that by the way in which he shadowed his wine-glass as a sign to the waiter not to refill it; passed the end of his cigar toward me that I might snip it with the cutter attached to my watch-chain, having none of his own, of course—a fact he made no comment upon; did everything, in fact, down to the smallest detail (and I watched and studied him pretty closely) that any one of you would have done under similar circumstances; all of which proved his birth and breeding, and all of which, you will admit, no man not born to it can acquire and not be detected by one who knows.
"My idea was—and this is another one of my theories—that you can restore a man's energies only when you restore his self-respect, and I intended to prove my theory on this Englishman. What I was after was first to bring him back to his old self—he taking his place where he belonged, shutting out the hideous nightmare that was pursuing him—and then get him a situation where he could be self-sustaining. This done, I proposed to write to his father and patch it up somehow between them, and the next time I went abroad we would go together and kill the fatted calf, haul in the Yule log, summon the tenants, build triumphal arches, and all that sort of thing.
"The following morning promptly at ten o'clock he rapped at my studio door. Pitkin saw him and thought he had come to buy out the studio, he was so well dressed—you remember him, Pit?"
Pitkin shook his head and smiled.
"Then commenced the hunt for work, and I tell you it was hard sledding; but I stuck at it, and at the end of the week old Porterfield gave him a position as entry clerk in his foreign department. During all that week he was spending his time between my studio and my aunt's, I looking after his expenditures—not much, only a few dollars a day. Every evening we dined at home, and every evening we roamed the world: mountain climbing, pig sticking, pheasant shooting in Devonshire; who won the Derby, and why; English politics, English art, the tariff—every topic under the sun that I knew anything about and a lot I didn't, he leading or following in the talk, his eyes fixed on mine, his rich, musical voice filling the room, his handsome, well-bred body comfortably seated in my aunt's easiest chair.
"And now comes the most interesting part of this story. The afternoon before he was to present himself at Porterfield's, about five o'clock—an hour before I reached home—he rang my aunt's front-door bell; told the servant that I had been called suddenly out of town for the night and had sent him post haste in a cab for my portmanteau and overcoat. Then he tripped upstairs to my apartment, waited beside the servant until she had stowed away in my best Gladstone my dress-suit, shirt with its links and pearl studs, collars—everything, even to my patent-leather shoes; and then, while she was out of the room in search of my overcoat, emptied into his pockets all my scarf-pins, my silver brandy-flask, and a lot of knick-knacks on my bureau, took the coat on his arm, preceded her leisurely downstairs, she carrying the bag, stepped into the cab, and I haven't seen him since!"