CHAPTER XIII.
WHEREIN LADY HERMIONE "ACTS FOR THE BEST" A dejected and disheveled super-clerk was called on to face a new crisis soon after he had apparently got rid of most of the persons concerned in the pandemonium which had raged for hours around that refuge of middle-class decorum and respectability, the Central Hotel in 27th Street.
As he was wont to explain in later days of blessed peacefulness: "The queerest part of the whole business was that I never had the slightest notion as to what was going to happen next.

Everything occurred like a flash of lightning, and imitated lightning by never striking twice in the same place." It was not to be expected that a man of the Earl of Valletort's social standing and experience would allow himself to be brow-beaten by a police official and an uncertain miscellany of people like Devar and the members of the Curtis family.

When the cool night air had tempered his indignation, and he was removed from the electrical atmosphere created by his son-in-law's positive disdain and Steingall's negative indifference, he began to survey the situation.

Though not wholly a stranger in New York, he was far from being versed in the technicalities of legal and police methods, so he bethought him of securing skilled advice.

The hour was late, but the fact merely presented a difficulty which was not insuperable to a person of even average intelligence.