Kwang Lee came in with a tray of fragrant tea and set it down on the table. Theo looked at it, and then at Collis, and then stalked angrily out of the room.

In his gambling days in New York, Collis had learned that if a trick works once, it will invariably work again. That was why he paid two hundred dollars to the proprietors of the Columbia Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue for two hours’ use of a south-facing sitting-room; and that was why he talked during the next two days to Representative Harold Watkins, of Minnesota, and to a reticent gentleman who ran a small specialist store on Ninth Street. Then, the following Monday, he nailed a rosette to the door of Senator Teasdale’s house, and waited for Alice to call back.

The meeting at the Columbia Hotel was arranged for two-thirty on Wednesday afternoon. It was then, as only Collis and the reticent gentleman from Ninth Street knew, that the natural sunlight in the sitting-room was at its brightest, so that anyone who sat by the window in one of two carefully-positioned armchairs was ideally lighted for a wet-plate collodion photograph. Representative Harold Watkins certainly didn’t know, as he stumped heftily up the hotel stairs in his green broadcloth suit, his face as purple as a blueberry. Neither did the man who stepped quickly down from a black private carriage outside, and crossed the sidewalk to the hotel entrance with his hand raised to shield his face and his hat tugged down over his eyes.

Collis was waiting by the door to greet Representative Watkins as he came puffing in. ‘You won’t be sorry you came,’ he said with a warm smile. ‘This is what I call the opportunity of a lifetime.’

Watkins circled the suite like a gasping hippopotamus, wiping his neck with a pocket handkerchief and saying over and over again: ‘Stairs. You didn’t tell me there were going to be stairs. I wouldn’t have come at all if I’d known about the stairs.’

He was just beginning to cool off when there was a quiet knock at the door and Senator Stride stepped in.

Considering how long Senator Stride had been imprisoned, and how much he had aged since Collis had last seen him, he was surprisingly fit, and composed. Only his deep-set eyes, already dark, seemed darker. He shook Collis by the hand, and then Representative Watkins, and at last Collis had his two subjects sitting in their allotted chairs by the window. Only Collis noticed the lens that protruded from the curtained-off doorway at the back of the room, and only Collis heard the click of the mechanism as the reticent gentleman from Ninth Street took his first picture.

‘Well, Senator,’ said Watkins. ‘I never thought I’d live to see you in such a difficult hole.’

‘I never thought I’d live to see this nation of ours torn in half by civil war,’ said Senator Stride. His voice was hoarser than before, from all of his months in prison, but it was still commanding, and deep.