Perhaps it was because he was ashamed of his behaviour, and wanted to put a distance between himself and the night’s crude action. Violence could never be the answer, to anything. It was satisfactory to have clipped Jack Lett so squarely on the jaw, and pleasing (as a neat, back-handed piece of repartee is pleasing) to have rounded it off with a complimentary poke at Charles Bannister. But the physical acts did not settle anything, they disposed of nothing save the immediate urge to express his disgust. The whole thing needed dealing with on quite another plane.

Perhaps it was something queer that had gone astray, something in Jack Lett’s phrase about ‘laying’, which continued to nag him, and made him want to clear a space for thought. There was one single word – he could not remember which – that remained stuck in his brain; an object in cloudy aspic, too deep to be distinguished. He felt he could not write the full story until he remembered it.

Perhaps it was his love for Esther that stopped him filing the story immediately: his emerging, protective love that wanted above everything to shield her from the tremendous scandal he was about to unloose. A little delay could do no harm; and it might clarify her position, presenting it in a new and innocent light. How fearful, how vile, if he wrote a straightforward piece about the swindle, with Esther as the wicked centre of it, and then found that he had overlooked some angle which explained or even cancelled her part in it.

He could not think what such an angle could be; but it might be there. For his peace of mind, indeed, it must be.

Perhaps the real reason was Mrs Bannister, next morning.

Harry Grant had spent much of the war in the Navy; and now, a phrase from that war – ‘Close watertight doors’ – returned irresistibly to mock him. For, next morning all safety doors had been slammed, all clips screwed home: the ship, mortally hit, was putting up an atavistic struggle for survival. Next morning, when he came up to the suite, prowling for facts, intent on straightening things out, he found himself completely blanked off from all further contact.

First, Jack Lett had disappeared. “Gone back West,” said the floor waiter, an old friend of Grant’s who had the habit of gossip. “Took the first plane out. Big contract coming up, I reckon.” Then, Charles Bannister had gone to hospital – “for a thorough check-up,” said his personal valet, and added caustically: “Not a day too soon, either …” Then, Esther was incommunicado, held behind locked doors over which Mrs Bannister’s secretary stood guard. “She’s not well at all,” said the latter, an earnest, negative woman, who travelled everywhere with them. “Mrs Bannister wants her to rest. She can’t see anyone, I’m afraid.”

Finally, there was Mrs Bannister herself. Grant met her in the same big sitting-room where he had had the late-night session with Jack Lett: the room, now sunny, was purged of its overnight shocks and shadows, neutral in this sordid battle. He stood up as she came in – and while she was still halfway towards him, it became crystal clear that, before he flew back to Hollywood, Jack Lett must have talked. Here, the watertight door had slammed shut on a direct order from the bridge.