It could not yet be morning, Desmond decided, as he followed his escort down a broad corridor with windows shuttered and barred like that of his room. They descended a flight of steps to a small tiled hall, lighted, like corridor and staircase, by artificial light. From a door that stood ajar came the murmur of voices. Heinrich ushered his prisoner into a long low-ceilinged room. Four men were seated at the end of an oval table, their faces indistinctly seen through a thin haze of blue tobacco smoke that drifted in the close air. Grundt presided at the head of the board, a round-shouldered, red-bearded Jew on his right, a grossly plebeian-looking man with a face the colour of suet, thin greyish hair plastered across a shining bald pate, and a great paunch, sprawling in the chair on his left. Next to him was a middle-aged man with a stiff grey beard and a stiff face who sat bolt upright, his hands folded in his lap. “Be seated, Major,” said Clubfoot cordially, and pointed to a chair next to the Jew. “Mr. Blund, the cigars are with you!” The full, deep voice was courteous, even genial, and a jovial smile played about the full lips. Desmond took the proffered chair, but waved aside the box of Partagas which the fat man pushed in his direction. He felt his hands growing cold. By bitter experience he knew that Clubfoot was never so dangerous as in these moments of expansion. “The fortune of war!” Grundt resumed. “You played your cards admirably . . . up to a point, lieber Okewood! I have always said you were an opponent worthy of my steel. Perhaps, in this instance, you were just a trifle . . . shall we say over-confident? . . .” Desmond, who had been taking stock of his surroundings, pulled himself resolutely together. The bland self-assurance of Grundt, he noticed, was far from being shared by his companions. The Jew was a mass of nerves, rapaciously tearing at his yellow, deeply bitten finger-nails, the little pig eyes of the fat man were restless with apprehension, and there was an air of tension about the very rigidity of the enigmatical greybeard across the table. “You and your rather unsavoury accomplices are playing a dangerous game, Herr Doktor,” he said as bravely as he might. “The riff-raff of international espionage”—he paused and gazed with cool deliberation first at the Jew at his side and then at Greybeard—“live from hand to mouth, as we all know, and cannot be over-scrupulous. But I must say I wonder what an Englishman”—he stared pointedly at the fat man as he spoke—“is doing in your ill-favoured company!” The fat man struggled up in his chair with malice depicted in every feature of his leaden-hued face. “You keep a civil tongue in your ’ead, d’jeer?” he spluttered.