There was a pause. The manager finished his Madeira and laid the glass neatly on the sideboard. He thought for a moment and then looked up at Collis with a cajoling, almost friendly expression.

‘You’re sure I can’t persuade you to change your mind?’

‘Out,’ Collis said.

‘Very well.’ The manager nodded. ‘I’m sorry to hear you talk that way, but if you feel you can’t accommodate me, what more can I do? I’ll be around in forty-eight hours in any event, to see if you’ve decided to pay. I’ll bring my two friends from Chatham Square, too, if you’d care to meet them again.’

Collis seized the manager by the sleeve and pulled him roughly towards the door while the manager cried, ‘Here! Here! Steady, Mr Edmonds!’ But Collis was too furious to stop. He wrenched open the door and shoved the manager out into the hallway. Then he stalked out after him and pushed him again, so that the man fell against the hall-stand and was showered in derbies and silk hats.

‘Out!’ shouted Collis. ‘Out!’

He opened the heavy front door and manhandled the manager on to the front step. Angus, aroused by the noise and the commotion, hurried along the hallway as fast as his corsetry would permit, but he was too late to prevent Collis from kicking the manager right in the seat of his pants, so that the man howled in pain and staggered down the five marble steps to the street clutching his backside.

‘Don’t come back!’ yelled Collis. ‘Not you, nor your boxers, nor anybody to do with you!’

‘I warn you!’ shouted the manager. He was crimson in the face now, and just as angry as Collis.

‘Warn all you damn well want!’ Collis told him. ‘Just make sure you don’t try to set foot in this house again!’

Angus, his eyeglasses perched precariously on the end of his nose, stood beside Collis and watched the manager limp to the corner of Gramercy Park and wave for a cab. Outside, it was a warm, dusty day, and a girl in a carriage gave Collis a saucy glance from under her parasol as she and her unimpressible-looking mother rolled by. Collis didn’t, and couldn’t, take any notice. As he turned away from the open door and walked back across the hallway, he began to understand how much his life had changed in just a few days. A couple of weeks ago, he would have called at once for his horse and contrived to gallop around the block so that he could raise his hat to a girl as pretty as that, and beg her mother for an introduction.

He drew hard at his cigar to rekindle it. Behind him, Angus closed the front door and came shuffling back, shaking his head.

‘You look distinctly unhappy,’ said Collis.