“Mein Gott!” he murmured in a sort of fishlike gasp.

This illuminating remark was my first clue.

“Ah! Mein Herr is German?” I inquired, not stirring from my place.

The demand wrought an instant change in him—­he drew himself up, perhaps to five feet five.

“Vat you got against the Germans?” he asked me, almost with menace.  It was the voice of a fanatic intoning “Die Wacht am Rhein”—­of a zealot speaking for the whole embattled Vaterland.

The situation was becoming farcical.

“Nothing in the world, I assure you,” I replied.  “They are a simple, kindly people.  They are musical.  They have given the world Schiller, Goethe, the famous Kultur, and a new conception of the possibilities of war.  But I think they should have kept out of Belgium, and I feel the same way about my room—­and don’t you try to pull a pistol or I may feel more strongly still.”

“I ain’t got no pistol, nein,” declared my visitor, sulkily.  His resentment had already left him; he had shrunk back to five feet three.

“Well, I have, but I’ll worry along without it,” I remarked, with a glance at the nearest bag.  As targets, I don’t regard my fellow-creatures with great enthusiasm and, moreover, I could easily have made two of this mousy champion of a warlike race.  Illogically, I was feeling that to bully him was sheer brutality.  Besides this, my dinner was not being improved by the delay.

“Look here,” I said amiably, “I can’t see that you’ve taken anything.  Speak up lively now; I’ll give you just one chance.  If you care to tell me how you got through a locked door and what you were after, I’ll let you go.  I’m off to the firing line, and it may bring me luck!”

Hope glimmered in his eyes.  In broken English, with a childlike ingenuousness of demeanor, he informed me that he was a first-class locksmith—­first-glass he called it—­who had been sent by the management to open a reluctant trunk.  He had entered my room, I was led to infer, by a mistake.

“I go now, ja?” he concluded, as postscript to the likely tale.

“The devil you do!  Do you take me for an utter fool?” I asked, excusably nettled, and stepping to the telephone, I took the receiver from its hook.

“Give me the manager’s office, please,” I requested, watching my visitor.  “Is this the manager?  This is Mr. Bayne speaking, Room four hundred and three.  I’ve found a man investigating my trunk—­a foreigner, a German.”  An exclamation from the manager, and from the listening telephone-girl a shriek!  “Yes; I have him.  Yes; of course I can hold him.  Send up your house detective and be quick!  My dinner is spoiling—­”

The receiver dropped from my hand and clattered against the wall.  The little German, suddenly galvanized, had leaped away from the trunk, not toward me and the door beyond me, but toward the electric switch.  His fingers found and turned it, plunging the room into the darkness of the grave.  Taken unaware, I barred his path to the hall, only to hear him fling up the window across the room.  Against the faint square of light thus revealed, I saw him hang poised a moment.  Then with a desperate noise, a moan of mixed resolve and terror, he disappeared.