When Ethel discovers the draft of a letter her husband was evidently preparing to send her, warning of terrible danger, Tommy decides to track Pitt-Heron down.

Pitt-Heron has inadvertently become involved in an international criminal organisation known as "the Power-House", led by the rich art connoisseur Andrew Lumley, and has been forced to flee.

In order to avoid further distress to the already-traumatised Ethel Pitt-Heron, Leithen offers to have the whole affair hushed up if Lumley will take the opportunity to catch the boat train to Paris before 9.30, and never return.

So I have printed this story, written in the smooth days before the war, in the hope that it may enable an honest man here and there to forget for an hour the too urgent realities.

[3] What the critic Christopher Harvie calls "perhaps the most famous line in all Buchan"[4] occurs during the first meeting between Leithen and Lumley, when the latter tells the former, "You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilisation from barbarism.

Harvie cites a comparable passage from the second volume of The Golden Bough, where Frazer speaks of "a solid layer of savagery beneath the surface of society," which, "unaffected by the superficial changes of religion and culture," is "a standing menace to civilisation.

Talking to Lumley, Leithen is reminded of an encounter he once had in Tyrol with a "Nietzschean" German professor who told him, "Someday there will come the marriage of knowledge and will, and then the world will march."