He followed James to the door.
He paused there as the flunky drew open the great mahogany portal for
him to pass into the vestibule.
Beyond the wrought-iron gates in the dark highway Black Riley and his
two pals casually strolled, fingering under their coats the inevitably
fatal weapons that were to make the reward of the rag-doll theirs.
Fuzzy stopped at the Millionaire's door and bethought himself. Like
little sprigs of mistletoe on a dead tree, certain living green thoughts
and memories began to decorate his confused mind. He was quite drunk,
mind you, and the present was beginning to fade. Those wreaths and
festoons of holly with their scarlet berries making the great hall
gay--where had he seen such things before? Somewhere he had known
polished floors and odors of fresh flowers in winter, and--and some one
was singing a song in the house that he thought he had heard before.
Some one singing and playing a harp. Of course, it was Christmas--Fuzzy
though he must have been pretty drunk to have overlooked that.
And then he went out of the present, and there came back to him out of
some impossible, vanished, and irrevocable past a little, pure-white,
transient, forgotten ghost--the spirit of _noblesse oblige_.
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