"Steady, old chap! Your nerves are dicky, that's what's the matter with you."
"It's the first time in my life," Harvey Grimm muttered, "but I've got them now. I feel that I'm cornered. I did Brodie in this morning. I left him at eleven o'clock, gagged and tied in the workshop he tracked me to. I was Edward Levy there, and there isn't one of them except the old man who knew otherwise. Brodie himself never recognised me. The only fear is if the old man peaches. He's had a couple of thousand of the best, and he hoards gold and loves it as though it were his own lifeblood. Thank God, here are the cocktails!"
"I shall write an epic about you this afternoon," the poet declared. "You're tense, Harvey, that's what you are. You're strung up. There's a different sense in the words you speak, a sort of quivering significance in everything you say. You're feeling life, man."
"I'm feeling afraid, if that's anything," Harvey Grimm confessed, raising his glass. "There was a woman in it, of course—and God knows I was careful!—a fierce, strong young Jewess. If she gets her grandfather by the throat, she'll wring the truth out of him."
Cresswell rose to his feet.
"It will do you good to eat, my friend," he suggested. "I find you exciting, vibrating, stimulating, but you are wearing yourself out."
Harvey Grimm sat with tightly clenched fists.
"I'm afraid to go in the restaurant," he said. "Do you notice how that man at the bar is staring, Cresswell? Who's he?"
"Don't be a silly ass!" his companion exclaimed. "That's Greaves, the London correspondent of the New York Trombone. He'd be all over our story if he knew it. Come along. Pull yourself together, man ... upright!"
Harvey Grimm did his best. He walked into the restaurant with almost his usual airy bonhomme. An acquaintance stopped the two men.