noon
Ten minutes later the fingers of one hand -- he was swimming on his side -- at the bottom of its stroke touched pebbles . He lowered his feet and waded through extensive shallows to a wide and sandy beach . The window of the living-room in his suite at the Walpole , set high in cliff-like walls , commanded a southward vista of Fifth Avenue whose enchantment , clothed in ever changing guises of light and shade , was so potent that Lanyard , on the first day of his tenancy , thought it could never tire . Yet by noon of the third he was viewing it with the eyes of soul-destroying ennui , though the disfavour it had so quickly won in his sight was , he knew , due less to cloying familiarity than to the uncertainty and discontent that were eating out his heart . Three days before , immediately on arriving in New York and installing himself in this hotel , to whose management he was well known from other days , he had cabled Eve de Montalais and Wertheimer . The response to the latter -- a cheerful request that credit be arranged for him by cable -- was as prompt and satisfactory as he had expected it to be . But from Madame de Montalais he heard nothing .