I like his quiet modesty under ordinary circumstances, and the sterling manner in which you have told me that he has come to the front in emergencies.

But stop: I don't ask you to break with him, for he may be useful to us after all.

There, let me finish these figures I am setting down, and I'll talk to you again." I sat down and watched him, and then looked round the bare office, with its high up window close to the ceiling, and ladder leading to the two rooms above.

Spread over the floor was a large foreign rug that my father had brought from the Mediterranean many years before, and this rug was stretched over the middle of the large office as if it had been brought from the cottage to make the place more homelike and comfortable.

But it struck me all at once that the rug had been placed there to hide a trap-door.