“Mr. Barnaby Grant?" asked the man. “I think you will be pleased to see me, will you not?”

They escaped from the Gallico, which seemed to be overrun with housemaids, to a very small caffè in a shaded by-way off the Piazza Navona, a short walk away. His companion had suggested it. “Unless, of course,” he said archly, “you prefer something smarter — like the Colonna, for instance,” and Barnaby had shuddered. He took his attaché case with him, and at his guest’s suggestion unlocked it. There, in two loose-leaf folders, lay his book, enclosed by giant-sized rubber bands. The last letter from his agent still lay on top, just as he had left it.

He had rather wildly offered his guest champagne cocktails, cognac, wine — anything — but when reminded that it was not yet ten o’clock in the morning settled for coffee. “Well then,” he said, “at a more appropriate hour — you will let me — and in the meantime I must — well — of course.”

He slid his hand inside his jacket. His heart still thumped at it like a fist.

“You are thinking of the reward so generously offered,” said his companion. “But — please — no. No. It is out of the question. To have been of service, even on so insignificant a scale, to Barnaby Grant — that really is a golden reward. Believe me.”

Barnaby had not expected this and he at once felt he had committed a gigantic error in taste. He had been misled, he supposed, by general appearances: not only by the shabby alpaca jacket that had replaced the English tweed and like it was hooked over the shoulders, displaying a dingy open shirt with worn cuffs, nor by the black-green hat or the really lamentable shoes, but by something indefinable in the man himself. “I wish,” he thought, “I could take an.instant liking to him. I owe him that, at the least.”