Class 10 English Footprints without Feet Chapter 3, The Midnight Visitor by Robert Arthur, is a clever espionage thriller in which fat, sloppy-looking secret agent Ausable outwits armed rival spy Max in his sixth-floor French hotel room using pure presence of mind and two fabricated stories—a non-existent balcony and the police at the door.
What Class 10 English (Footprints without Feet) Chapter 3 Covers
Story Summary: The Midnight Visitor (Robert Arthur) Young romantic writer Fowler is disappointed on meeting secret agent Ausable: instead of a mysterious figure surrounded by dark-eyed beauties and crackles of pistols, Ausable is very fat, speaks French and German only passably with a strong American accent from Boston, and lives in a small, musty room on the sixth and top floor of a gloomy French hotel. Yet as soon as Ausable switches on the light in his room, Fowler gets his first authentic thrill of the day: standing halfway across the room with a small automatic pistol in his hand is rival secret agent Max, who has entered with a passkey to steal a vital report on new missiles due at 12:30. Calmly sitting down in an armchair, Ausable invents a furious complaint against the hotel management about a ‘nuisance of a balcony’ running under his window from the next apartment—so convincingly that when a loud knocking sounds at the door, Ausable casually tells Max it is the police he asked to check on him. Panicked, Max backs onto the windowsill to wait on the ‘balcony’ until the police leave, drops off with a shrill scream to the sixth-floor street below, and the door opens to reveal Henry the waiter carrying a tray with a bottle of wine and two glasses—and as Ausable tells a white-faced Fowler, ‘There were no police… and he won’t return. You see, my young friend, there is no balcony.’.
Exercises in Chapter 3
- Read and Find Out & Think about It ask how Ausable is different from other secret agents, who Fowler is and what his first authentic thrill of the day is, how Max got in, and how Ausable outwits Max without lifting a finger.
Read Class 10 English (Footprints without Feet) Chapter 3 Online
More Chapters
- Previous: Chapter 2: The Thief’s Story
- Next: Chapter 4: A Question of Trust
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FAQ
How did Ausable outwit Max in ‘The Midnight Visitor’?
Despite being held at gunpoint, Ausable remained completely calm and used his quick presence of mind to fabricate a detailed story about an annoying balcony just outside his sixth-floor window through which someone had entered the month before. When the waiter knocked on the door with drinks, Ausable claimed it was the police coming to check on the missile report, tricking Max into jumping out of the window onto a balcony that did not exist.
How is Ausable different from the stereotypical image of a secret agent?
Unlike the suave, athletic secret agents of spy fiction, Ausable is extremely fat, wheezes as he walks, speaks French and German only passably without ever losing his Boston American accent, and stays in a small, musty room on the top floor of a gloomy French hotel. His real weapon is his razor-sharp intellect and composure under pressure.