The man looked up as I approached.  He was wearing a soft black felt hat and a black overcoat and on his arm hung an umbrella streaming with rain.  His candlestick stood on the floor at his feet.  It had apparently just been extinguished, for my nostrils sniffed the odour of burning tallow.

“You have a light?” the stranger said in German in a curiously breathless voice.  “I have just come upstairs and the wind blew out my candle and I could not get the door open.  Perhaps you could ...”  He broke off gasping and put his hand to his heart.

“Allow me,” I said.  The lock of the door was inverted and to open the door you had to insert the key upside-down.  I did so and the door opened easily.  As it swung back I noticed the number of the room was 33, next door to mine.

“Can I be of any assistance to you?  Are you unwell?” I said, at the same time lifting my candle and scanning the stranger’s features.

He was a young man with close-cropped black hair, fine dark eyes and an aquiline nose with a deep furrow between the eyebrows.  The crispness of his hair and the high cheekbones gave a suggestion of Jewish blood.  His face was very pale and his lips were blueish.  I saw the perspiration glistening on his forehead.

“Thank you, it is nothing,” the man replied in the same breathless voice.  “I am only a little out of breath with carrying my bag upstairs.  That’s all.”

“You must have arrived just before I did,” I said, remembering the cab that had driven away from the hotel as I drove up.

“That is so,” he answered, pushing open his door as he spoke.  He disappeared into the darkness of the room and suddenly the door shut with a slam that re-echoed through the house.

As I had calculated, my room was next door to his, the end room of the corridor.  It smelt horribly close and musty and the first thing I did was to stride across to the windows and fling them back wide.

I found myself looking across a dark and narrow canal, on whose stagnant water loomed large the black shapes of great barges, into the windows of gaunt and weather-stained houses over the way.  Not a light shone in any window.  Away in the distance the same clock as I had heard before struck the quarter—­a single, clear chime.

It was the regular bedroom of the maison meublee—­worn carpet, discoloured and dingy wallpaper, faded rep curtains and mahogany bedstead with a vast edredon, like a giant pincushion.  My candle, guttering wildly in the unaccustomed breeze blowing dankly through the chamber, was the sole illuminant.  There was neither gas nor electric light laid on.

The house had relapsed into quiet.  The bedroom had an evil look and this, combined with the dank air from the canal, gave my thoughts a sombre tinge.

“Well,” I said to myself, “you’re a nice kind of ass!  Here you are, a British officer, posing as a brother Hun in a cut-throat Hun hotel, with a waiter who looks like the official Prussian executioner.  What’s going to happen to you, young feller my lad, when Madame comes along and finds you have a British passport?  A very pretty kettle of fish, I must say!