Shadows in a room, half-lights, and silence are tricky things; they can stay somnolent and soothing or become sinister, catching their moods from faces and groupings. As yet the mood in that room, heavily ornate with sporting prints and paintings of women and food, seemed placid enough. Two men were intent on billiards, two others were looking on.

The green-coned droplight over the billiard table showed up sharply only one of the players, the Jackdaw, as he was known there. His opponent and the two onlookers were well back in the half-light. In their excellent poker faces, serious, sharp-eyed, and as yet impassive, no outsider, had there been any, would have read anything but quiet interest in the protracted run the Jackdaw was making with a bewitched billiard cue. For they made no comment and away from the table the light was shadowed.

The shadows also mitigated a certain incongruity of taste in that room. For alongside of an auction-room nude in a heavy gilt frame hung a dreamy Corot, an original. A Daumier was neighbor to a fleshy photograph of a burlesque-company queen. On the mantelpiece a Tanagra figurine shrank sensitively back from a pot-bellied bronze clock. On a table a priceless little Ming vase had been shoved back to make room for ponderous ashtrays of pressed glass.

The click of ivory balls in expert play and the pompous ticking of the clock had the silence to themselves; and the three men in the shadow seemed content to look on indefinitely at the Jackdaw.

But, among the card tables throughout the rest of the house, word was quietly passing:

“Closing up, gents!”

An out-of-town man, deeply absorbed in a losing streak at stud poker, looked up irritably at the white-jacketed attendant who was thus shutting off his chances for a recoup.

“What’s the idea of the curfew?” he demanded testily.

The attendant glanced uneasily through an arched doorway into the room where the billiard game was going on. Then he said curtly out of the side of his mouth:

“Orders!”

“Don’t argue!” muttered another player to the out-of-town man. “I’ll give you plenty of chance to get back at me anywhere you say except here. Only come along and hurry!”

Quietly the attendant shepherded the players, group by group, throughout the house, saw to it that they left nothing behind, and ushered them singly out of the building, some by way of the front door, a few by a rear exit. Then, putting away his white coat and donning his street clothes, he himself left the house and seemed glad to go.