acquaintance. At home, in Cranston, he had no friends susceptible
to such an appeal as it was vitally necessary for him to make. His
relatives were not numerous: there were two aunts, the widows of his
father's brothers, and a number of old-maid cousins; and he had an uncle
in Iowa, a country minister whom he had not seen for years. But he could
not cable to any of these for money; nor could he quite conjure his
imagination into picturing any of them sending it if he did. And even to
cable he would have to pawn his watch, which was an old-fashioned one of
silver and might not bring enough to pay the charges.

He began to be haunted by fragmentary, prophetic visions--confused but
realistic in detail, and horridly probable--of his ejectment from the
hotel, perhaps arrest and trial. He wondered what they did in Italy to
people who "beat" hotels; and, remembering what some one had told him
of the dreadfulness of Italian jails, convulsive shudderings seized upon
him.

The ruddy oblongs of sunlight crawled nearer to the east wall of the
room, stretching themselves thinner and thinner, until finally they
were not there at all, and the room was left in deepening grayness.
Carriages, one after the other, in unintermittent succession, rumbled
up to the hotel-entrance beneath the window, bringing goldfish for
the Pincio and the fountains of Villa Borghese. Wild strains from the
Hungarian orchestra, rhapsodical twankings of violins, and the runaway
arpeggios of a zither crazed with speed-mania, skipped along the
corridors and lightly through Mellin's door. In his mind's eye he saw
the gay crowd in the watery light, the little tables where only
five days ago he had sat with the loveliest of all the anemone-like
ladies....