question: Who passes a silver tray to Allan? answer: Mr. Arthur Mason paragraph: Allan crushed the page in his hand and hurled it at the window. "Damn you," he cried, "will you never leave me be? Shall I never finish a story in peace?" He pounded his desk in vain, cursing the foul muse that drove him. The next day, Allan sat on a florally patterned chair in a well-furnished parlor. Taking a measured sip of white wine from his crystal glass, he glanced at his host – a cultured man dressed in a light suit of the current fashion and wearing his pale hair with a heavy set of sideburns – who passed him a silver tray. "Cucumber sandwich?" Allan took a sandwich between his fingers. "Thank you, Arthur." Arthur replaced the tray onto the lacquered cherry table that stood in the center of his ordered chamber. In a manner delicately balanced between somber and genial, he refilled their glasses. "How is the writing these days, my dear Mr. Clemm?" "Perfectly dreadful, my dear Mr. Mason," Allan sighed. "I had a perfect story in my pages; my hero returned home and reclaimed his love, I nearly had it tied together before…" "Before?" "Before that blasted impulse came over me and I started writing like Edgar Poe – though the most recent was not so morbid as my many others, thank Heaven." Arthur's face assumed a long-suffering aspect of authoritative exasperation. "I'm not familiar with Mr. Poe's works, but I assume you're referring to your unhealthy penchant for the fantastic." "It's far from a 'penchant,' Arthur. This is more like a compulsion, a beast that lies waiting in the dark for the perfect moment, then leaps and takes ahold of me, screaming out through my quill." "How perfectly awful." 