A terrible sound. A final sound. The slamming of a door, followed by the echo of smaller items rattling around the room. The silence left thereafter is one of marked melancholy. In that foreign room at the Lanesborough, laying in that foreign bed, Everett Ogden could not sleep. Not well. Not even with a fair amount of very fine scotch swimming through his blood stream.

He tossed for hours before he rose at last, hunting around until he found something to write with and something to write on. The words were scribbled hastily on the page, a hundred little words and rhymes and notes crossed and crisscrossed with the impatient lines of an impassioned hand. The evening had nearly caused his gentle heart to burst. As the sun rose, spilling light over the dim world outside, a weary Englishman copied the final product into his very tidy lettering, an elegant but masculine script.

He did not use the elegant bath. He did not tuck in his rumpled shirt. He did not smooth his unruly hair. Everett just carefully made the bed in which he had not really slept, and left in the center of it the heavy paper with the carefully chosen words. The draft was folded away and tucked into his pocket, and then Everett left the Lanesborough just as quietly as he had arrived. Not even the optimism of a morning sky and fresh air cheered him. He crawled home, crawled into the bath, and then crawled into a bottle so that he could finally crawl into his own bed get some bloody sleep.