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handkerchief out to stop the blood from getting all over my clothes, and felt about among the cheques lying on the carpet for my glasses. I found them eventually. They were bent a bit but not broken. When I put them on, I saw the soles of his shoes about a yard from my face.
    He was sitting in the armchair, leaning back, watching me.
    “Get up,” he said, “and watch that blood. Keep it off the rug.”
    As I got to my feet, he stood up quickly himself. I thought he was going to start hitting me again. Instead, he caught hold of one lapel of my jacket.
    “Do you have a gun?”
    I shook my head.
    He slapped my pockets, to make sure, I suppose, then shoved me away.
    “There are some tissues in the bathroom,” he said. “Go clean your face. But leave the door open.”
    I did as I was told. There was a window in the bathroom; but even if it had been possible to escape that way without breaking my neck, I don’t suppose I would have tried it. He would have heard me. Besides, where could I have escaped to? All he would have had to do was call down to the night concierge, and the police would have been there in five minutes. The fact that he had not called down already was at least something. Perhaps, as a foreigner, he did not want to get involved as a witness in a court case. After all, he had not actually lost anything; and if I were to eat enough humble pie, perhaps even cry a bit, he might decide to forget the whole thing; especially after the brutal way in which he had attacked me. That was my reasoning. I should have known better. You cannot expect common decency from a man like Harper.
    When I came out of the bathroom, I saw that he had picked up the cheque folder and was putting it back in the suitcase. The cheques I had torn out, however, were lying on the bed. He gathered them up and motioned me towards the sitting room.
    “In there.”
    As I went in, he moved past me to the door and bolted it.
    There was a marble-topped commode against the side wall. On the commode was a tray with an ice bucket, a bottle of brandy, and some glasses. He picked up a glass, then looked at me.
    “Sit down right there,” he said.
    The chair he motioned to was by a writing table under the window. I obeyed orders; there did not seem to be anything else to do. My nose was still bleeding, and I had a headache.
    He slopped some brandy into the glass and put it on the table beside me. For a moment or two I felt encouraged. If you are going to have a man arrested you don’t sit him down first and give him a drink. Perhaps it was just going to be a man-to-man chat in which I told him a hard-luck story and said how sorry I was, while he got dewy-eyed over his own magnanimity and decided to give me another chance.
    That one did not last long.
    He poured himself a drink and then glanced across at me as he put ice in the glass.
    “First time you’ve been caught at it, Arthur?”
    I blew my nose a little to keep the blood running before I answered. “It’s the first time I’ve even been tempted, sir. I don’t know what came over me. Perhaps it was the brandy I had with you. I’m not really used to it.”
    He turned and stared at me. All at once his face was neither old-young nor young-old. It was white and pinched and his mouth worked in an odd way. I have seen faces go like that before and I braced myself. There was a metal lamp on the writing table beside me. I wondered if I could possibly hit him with it before he got to me.
    But he did not move. His eyes flickered towards the bedroom and then back to me.
    “You’d better get something straight, Arthur,” he said slowly. “That was just a little roughing up you had in there. If I really start giving you a going over, you’ll leave here on a stretcher. Nobody’s going to mind about that except you. I came back and caught you stealing. You tried to strong arm your way out of it and I had to defend myself. That’s how it’ll be. So cut out the bull, and the lies.