Footprints Without Feet: The Midnight Visitor and A Question of Trust — Class 10 English Notes & Practice

Take a breath. If you have opened this page because your Footprints Without Feet chapters feel like a blur of names — Ausable, Max, Fowler, Horace Danby, a woman in a red dress — you are in exactly the right place, and you are not behind. These two stories, The Midnight Visitor by Robert Arthur and A Question of Trust by Victor Canning, are the friendliest pair in your whole supplementary reader. Both are short. Both are funny in a dry, quiet way. Both are built on the same beautiful idea: the person who stays calm and keeps talking wins, and the person holding the gun or the crowbar loses. Once you see that pattern, you stop memorising and start understanding — and understanding is what actually survives exam pressure. We are going to walk through both stories slowly, in ordinary language, with model answers written out fully so you can see how marks are earned rather than guessed at. Nothing here assumes you have read the stories carefully. If all you remember is “something about a balcony” and “a burglar who got caught”, that is a perfectly good place to begin.

What You’ll Learn

Your Game Plan

1. Read the two “Story in Simple Words” sections first. Do not touch anything else until you can retell each story out loud to a wall in about a minute. This single skill is worth more than any list of themes.
2. Then do the character sections. Characters are where most marks live in Footprints Without Feet questions. Learn two or three adjectives per character and one incident that proves each adjective.
3. Study the two “how the trick worked” sections with the diagrams. These are the heart of both stories. If you can explain the trick step by step, you can answer almost any long question that is set.
4. Read the themes and technique sections once, slowly. You are not memorising them. You are collecting sentences you could use in an answer.
5. Do the Practice Worksheet with the answers hidden. Write your answers on paper first. Only then open the “Show Answer” boxes. Reading an answer feels like learning; writing one actually is learning.
6. Come back after two days and re-do only the questions you got wrong. That second visit is where the chapter finally sticks.

Study Notes

How to Answer Supplementary Reader Questions

Before we go anywhere near Ausable or Horace, let us fix the thing that quietly costs students the most marks: answer shape. A literature answer is not a retelling. It is a small argument with evidence attached. Once you internalise the shape, every question in this chapter becomes easier, because you stop worrying about what to say and start worrying only about which incident to pick.

Here is the shape I want you to use for every short answer, and I want you to use it so often that it becomes boring:

1. Claim. One sentence that directly answers the question asked. No warm-up, no “In the story we see that…”
2. Evidence. One or two specific incidents from the text, named precisely. Not “he did something clever” but “he invented a balcony below his window”.
3. Link. One sentence that ties the evidence back to the exact words of the question.

Think of it like a sandwich. The claim and the link are the bread; the evidence is the filling. A sandwich with no filling is just bread, and a pile of filling with no bread is a mess on a plate. Examiners can spot both from across the room.

Now, how long should an answer be? Use this rough guide and stop worrying about it afterwards:

• 2 marks: roughly 30–40 words. One claim, one piece of evidence. No introduction, no conclusion.
• 3 marks: roughly 40–50 words. One claim, two pieces of evidence, or one piece of evidence explained a little more fully.
• 5–6 marks: roughly 100–120 words. Three or four points, each with its own evidence, in separate sentences or a short paragraph each. A one-line opening and a one-line closing are welcome here.

Word counts are guidance, not law. Nobody counts your words. But if a 2-mark answer runs to twelve lines, you have spent time you needed for the long question at the end of the paper, and that is a real, measurable loss.

Notice what happened there. The strong answer is barely longer, but every clause carries information. That is the difference we are aiming for, and it is a habit, not a talent.

One more piece of technique before we start. In supplementary reader questions, examiners very often ask why rather than what. “What did Ausable say about the balcony?” is a rare question. “Why did Max believe Ausable’s story about the balcony?” is a common one. The second kind needs you to explain a character’s mind, not just report an event. Whenever you see “why”, “how”, or “what does this tell us about”, reach for motive and character, never for plot summary alone.

Do not move on until this section feels comfortable. Everything that follows is built on it. If the three-part shape — claim, evidence, link — still feels vague, write out Example 1 by hand once. Copying a good answer once with your own pen teaches your hand a rhythm that reading never will.

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The Midnight Visitor: The Story in Simple Words

Let us build this story the way you would build it if you were telling a friend on the school bus. Short sentences. No literary vocabulary yet. That comes later.

The setting. We are in France, in a small, rather shabby hotel. Ausable, a secret agent, has a room right at the top — the sixth floor. The room is cramped and gloomy, with a single window looking down onto the street far below. There is nothing romantic about it at all, and that plainness is not an accident. Robert Arthur wants the setting to feel as un-glamorous as possible, because the whole story is about the gap between what spy work looks like in books and what it is actually like.

The disappointed visitor. With Ausable is a young writer named Fowler. Fowler has attached himself to Ausable hoping to see the world of espionage up close — the kind of world he has read about, full of chases and gunfire and dangerous strangers in doorways. What he has found instead is a very fat man who has lived in France for more than twenty years without ever losing his American accent, and who orders drinks from the hotel waiter like any ordinary guest. Fowler is politely, obviously let down. Ausable, who has seen a hundred young men arrive with the same expectations, does not argue with him.

The reason tonight matters. Ausable is expecting something important: a report about new missiles is to reach him in that room tonight. So the room, dull as it looks, is briefly one of the more valuable rooms in Europe.

The intruder. When Ausable and Fowler come back to the room, someone is already inside. His name is Max. He is a small dark man, and he is holding a small automatic pistol. He is a rival agent and he has come for the report. This is exactly the sort of scene Fowler wanted — and, being a real one rather than a fictional one, it terrifies him.

The moment everything turns. Here is where the story becomes clever. Ausable does not raise his hands and gasp. He behaves as though a man with a gun in his room is a household annoyance, like a leaking tap. He complains — genuinely irritated — about the balcony below his window. He says that is the second time in a month somebody has come in that way, and that he has already complained to the hotel management about it. Max, who had checked the building and seen no balcony, is unsettled. Ausable explains, casually, that the balcony belongs to the apartment next door and extends under his own window, so anyone who knows about it can step across.

The bluff on top of the bluff. Ausable then mentions, almost as an afterthought, that he telephoned the police because of the report, and that a man is due to arrive at any moment to guard it. Max now has a decision to make and very little time to make it in.

The knock. Someone knocks at the door. Ausable, sounding neither pleased nor alarmed, says that will be the police. Max panics. He tells Ausable to send them away, backs to the window, swings a leg over the sill and lowers himself onto the balcony — and screams, and falls six floors to the street.

The punchline. The knock was not the police. It was Henry, the hotel waiter, bringing up the drinks Ausable had ordered earlier that evening. And there was never any balcony. Ausable invented it on the spot. He pours the drinks, and when Fowler nervously asks whether Max will come back, Ausable answers, quite comfortably, that he will not.

Now let us look at the shape of the story as a whole, because CBSE questions sometimes ask you to trace how tension is built and released.

Read down that last column and you have the story’s personality: it refuses, again and again, to be the thriller Fowler wanted. That refusal is the joke, and it is also the point.

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The Midnight Visitor: Ausable as a Character

Ausable is one of the most enjoyable characters in the whole Class 10 course, and he is enjoyable for a very specific reason: he is a hero built entirely out of things heroes are not supposed to have. He is overweight. He is unathletic. He does not look mysterious. He has spent over twenty years in France and still sounds American the moment he opens his mouth — which, for a spy, is close to a professional disaster. And he wins anyway.

Here are the qualities you should be able to name, each attached to a moment that proves it. Learn the pairs, not the adjectives.

• Composed under pressure. He walks into his own room and finds an armed enemy waiting. His reaction is not fear but annoyance — the tone of a man whose neighbour has parked badly again. That coolness is not decoration; it is the weapon.
• Quick-thinking and inventive. The balcony is manufactured on the spot, out of nothing, in the middle of a life-threatening situation. He does not merely lie; he builds a lie with texture — a second incident this month, a complaint already lodged with management, an explanation of which apartment the balcony belongs to.
• An excellent reader of people. He understands that Max is nervous, that Max has not been in this hotel before, and that a nervous man will believe a boring detail far faster than an exciting one. He designs the lie to fit the listener.
• Patient. He does not rush the trap. He plants the balcony first, lets it settle, and only then adds the police. The knock arrives on top of a mind already primed to panic.
• Unbothered by appearances. He knows perfectly well that he does not look the part, and he has clearly decided that looking harmless is more useful than looking dangerous. Fowler’s disappointment does not sting him at all.
• Cool afterwards, too. A man has just fallen to his death from his window, and Ausable pours the drinks. Whether you read that as professional hardness or as gallows humour, it tells you he has lived this life for a long time.

There is a subtler point worth making in a long answer, and it will lift a good answer to a very good one. Ausable’s greatest skill is not lying. It is tone. Anybody can say “there is a balcony below my window.” Only Ausable can say it while sounding bored by the whole business. Max is not persuaded by the information; he is persuaded by the delivery. A man inventing an escape route would sound eager. A man complaining about his landlord sounds put upon. Ausable chooses the second voice, and it saves his life.

Notice that this answer argues. It does not simply agree or disagree; it takes a position and defends it with the text. When a question uses quotation marks and asks “do you agree”, the examiner is inviting you to think, not to summarise. Accept the invitation.

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The Midnight Visitor: Fowler and Max as Characters

Ausable gets the glory, but the story only works because of the two men standing on either side of him. Let us take them one at a time, because CBSE loves asking about both.

Fowler: the reader inside the story. Fowler is a young writer. He has come to France because he wants material — he wants to see the real world of espionage. His head is full of the version he has read about: mystery, danger, sudden violence, exotic strangers. When he meets Ausable, that picture cracks. When he sees the shabby room, it cracks further. He is too polite to complain loudly, but his disappointment is unmistakable, and Ausable notices it without minding.

Fowler’s real function is structural. He is you. He is the person in the room who does not know what is happening, who is frightened when Max appears, who asks the questions you would ask, and who is astonished at the end. Robert Arthur puts him there so that Ausable’s calm has something to be measured against. Remove Fowler and the story loses half its comedy, because there is nobody left to be surprised.

Notice also how Fowler changes. He arrives wanting excitement and treating danger as entertainment. He leaves having watched a man die on his second evening of “research”. The story quietly suggests that the romantic idea of adventure and the reality of it are two different things, and that people who long for the first rarely enjoy the second.

Max: the man who had everything except nerve. Max is a small, dark man, and he is a rival agent. On paper he has all the advantages. He got into the room first. He knows about the report. He is holding the pistol. Ausable is unarmed and physically slow. In any reasonable account of that scene, Max should win.

He loses for three reasons, and you should be able to list them:

1. He is not calm. His words and actions carry a nervous edge from the start. He wants the report quickly and he wants the situation over.
2. He does not know the building. He looked for a balcony, saw none, and yet has no confident local knowledge to fall back on when Ausable tells him one exists. Ausable’s explanation — that the balcony belongs to the next apartment — slots neatly into the gap in Max’s knowledge.
3. He treats the police as the worst possible outcome. Once he accepts that the police are at the door, escape becomes more urgent than caution, and he stops checking anything. Panic makes people skip verification. That is the whole trap.

There is a hard little irony in Max’s death. He dies because he trusted the word of the man he was pointing a gun at. He believed an enemy. That is not stupidity exactly — it is what fear does to judgement.

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Related chapter: read the other two Footprints Without Feet chapters, Bholi and The Book That Saved the Earth.

The Midnight Visitor: How Ausable Outwits Max

This is the section to study hardest, because at least one long question from this story will ask you, in some form, how Ausable defeated Max. Let us take it apart into stages, so that you can rebuild it under exam pressure without missing a link.

Stage one: refuse the script. When a man points a gun at you, the expected response is fear. Fear tells the gunman that he is in control and that the situation is proceeding normally. Ausable refuses to supply it. By sounding annoyed rather than frightened, he immediately makes Max uncertain about who is in charge of the room. This costs Ausable nothing and buys him time to think.

Stage two: plant a boring lie. This is the masterstroke, and it is worth understanding properly. Ausable does not say anything dramatic. He complains about a balcony. He mentions that this is the second time in a month somebody has climbed in that way. He mentions that he has already complained to the management. Every one of those details is dull. Dullness is what makes them credible. A frightened man improvising an escape route would say something exciting; a genuinely irritated tenant says exactly this sort of tedious thing.

Stage three: absorb the objection. Max says he looked and there was no balcony. This is the moment the lie could die. Ausable does not argue or bluster; he supplies a small, technical explanation — the balcony belongs to the apartment next door and reaches under his window. A liar who is challenged and then adds a calm detail sounds more truthful, not less. Max’s own eyes are now competing with Ausable’s confidence, and confidence wins.

Stage four: add a clock. Ausable now says he has telephoned the police, who are coming to guard the report. This does two things at once. It creates urgency — Max no longer has all night. And it plants an expectation, so that any noise at the door will be interpreted in advance. Ausable is loading the gun that Max will later fire at himself.

Stage five: let luck arrive and name it. The knock comes. It is the waiter with the drinks Ausable ordered earlier. Ausable did not arrange the timing; he simply took what the evening gave him and labelled it. He says calmly that it is the police. Because Max has already been told the police are coming, he does not question the label for even a second.

Stage six: stand still. The most impressive part of Ausable’s performance is what he does not do. He does not push Max. He does not shout. He simply lets Max reach his own conclusion and act on it. Max goes out of the window himself. Ausable is, technically, guilty of nothing but a complaint about hotel maintenance.

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The Midnight Visitor: The Balcony That Never Was

The balcony deserves a section of its own, because it is the most examinable single object in the story and because students often describe it inaccurately. Let us be precise.

What Ausable claims. That there is a balcony below his window; that it belongs to the apartment next door but extends under his own window; that people have used it to get into his room before; that this is the second such intrusion in a month; and that he has already complained to the hotel management about the security problem it creates.

What is actually true. None of it. There is no balcony. The window opens onto a sheer drop of six floors. Every element of the story is invented on the spot while a pistol is pointed at him.

Now, why does such a thin story work? Look closely at how it is built and you will see four deliberate design features.

1. It is unflattering to Ausable. A man inventing a lie to save himself would invent something that made him look strong. Ausable invents something that makes him look like a man with a security problem he cannot get his landlord to fix. Lies that cost the liar something are far more believable than lies that benefit him.
2. It contains an irrelevant detail. “The second time in a month” is not needed for any purpose except realism. Real memories contain such counts. Invented ones usually do not.
3. It contains a bureaucratic detail. Complaining to the management is the least glamorous action imaginable. Nobody inventing a life-saving lie thinks to include paperwork.
4. It survives contradiction gracefully. When Max says he saw no balcony, Ausable does not panic or repeat himself louder. He explains the geometry — it belongs to the next apartment, it reaches under his window. That is exactly how a truthful person corrects a misunderstanding.

Here is an everyday analogy that may help you feel why this works. Imagine your friend arrives late and says, “Sorry, there was a dramatic accident and the police closed the whole road.” You would half-believe it. Now imagine your friend says, “Sorry, the auto driver took the long way round because of that stupid diversion near the water tank, same as last Tuesday, and I have told him twice now.” The second version is duller and far more convincing, because it is annoyed, specific and mildly self-deprecating. Ausable is telling the second kind of story.

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The Midnight Visitor: Themes

A theme is not a topic. “Spies” is a topic. “Intelligence defeats force” is a theme, because it makes a claim. When you write about themes, always write a sentence that could be argued with. Here are the five that this story genuinely supports, with the evidence you need for each.

1. Presence of mind is stronger than physical power. This is the story’s central claim and the one to lead with. Max has the pistol, the position and the physical advantage; Ausable has only his composure and his imagination, and he wins completely. Evidence: the balcony invention, the police bluff, and the fact that Ausable never so much as raises his voice.

2. Appearances are unreliable. Ausable does not look like a secret agent and is a superb one. The room does not look important and holds a report about new missiles. The knock does not sound like danger and is only a waiter, yet it kills a man. Nothing in the story is what it looks like, which is a neat joke given that its hero survives by making a lie look like the truth.

3. Fear destroys judgement. Max was, presumably, a trained agent. He is undone not by lack of skill but by nerves. Once he believes the police are outside, his mind stops testing and starts running. Ausable, who feels no fear, keeps every one of his faculties. Notice that the story does not say Ausable is braver; it shows that he is calmer, which is a different and more interesting quality.

4. Romance versus reality. Fowler wants the espionage of thrillers and gets the espionage of small hotel rooms and hotel management complaints. Yet the ordinary version turns out to be far deadlier than the exciting version he imagined. The story teases the adventure genre while being an excellent example of it.

5. Preparation beats improvisation. This is a subtler theme and worth a mark in a good answer. Ausable prepares the ground before he needs it. Max improvises throughout — he reacts to each new development rather than shaping any of them. The man who thinks one step earlier is the man who survives.

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The Midnight Visitor: Suspense, Irony and Narrative Technique

This section is for the questions that ask “how does the author create suspense” or “what makes this story effective”. These are marks that many students leave behind because nobody ever showed them what to say. Let us fix that.

Suspense: the deliberate withholding of one fact. Robert Arthur keeps exactly one piece of information from us: whether the balcony exists. We are placed with Fowler, who does not know the room and cannot tell. Because we do not know either, every sentence Ausable speaks could be truth or bluff, and we cannot relax. That single withheld fact does all the suspense work in the story. Notice how economical that is — there are no chases, no gunfights, no cliffhangers, just one unanswered question held for a few pages.

Suspense: the interruption that changes meaning. The knock at the door is the story’s cleverest device, because it means three different things to three different people at the same moment. To Max it means the police. To Fowler it means rescue or ruin, he cannot tell which. To Ausable it means the drinks have arrived. Any moment that carries three simultaneous meanings will feel tense, and this is a technique you can name in an answer.

Irony: three kinds, all present.

• Situational irony — the armed man is destroyed by the unarmed one; the professional intruder is killed by his own escape route. The outcome is the reverse of what the situation promises.
• Dramatic irony — on a second reading, when we know there is no balcony, every line about it becomes darkly funny, and we watch Max walk towards the window knowing exactly what waits there.
• Verbal irony — Ausable’s tone throughout is comically at odds with his danger. Complaining about hotel management while a pistol is pointed at you is a joke made under pressure.

Understatement as a style. The story’s humour is dry rather than loud. A man falls six floors and the narrative does not linger; Ausable pours a drink and answers Fowler’s question in a few words. This flatness is a deliberate choice: it makes Ausable seem hardened and it keeps the story from tipping into melodrama.

The twist ending, and why it is fair. A good twist must be surprising and, on reflection, inevitable. This one is. Every clue is on the page: Ausable ordered drinks earlier, so a waiter was always going to knock; Max himself said he had seen no balcony, so we were told the truth by the enemy and did not believe it. That is craftsmanship. A twist that arrives from nowhere is a cheat; a twist you could have seen is a pleasure.

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The Midnight Visitor: Why the Title Fits

Title questions look easy and are routinely answered badly, because students say “the title is appropriate because the visitor came at midnight” and stop. Let us build a proper answer, in layers, so you always have three things to say instead of one.

Layer one: the literal fit. The events take place late at night in Ausable’s hotel room, and the story is driven by an uninvited person who is already inside when the residents return. Max is, quite plainly, the midnight visitor. This layer earns you the first mark and nothing more.

Layer two: the atmospheric fit. “Midnight” carries associations the story exploits — darkness, secrecy, the hour when normal rules are suspended and cities are quiet enough that a scream can be heard from six floors up. It also carries the promise of the thriller genre Fowler loves, so the title sets up expectations that the story then playfully undercuts.

Layer three: the ironic fit, and this is where marks are won. The word “visitor” is beautifully wrong. A visitor is a guest — someone welcomed, offered a chair, given a drink. Max is an armed enemy. And yet the story treats him almost exactly like a guest: Ausable chats with him, complains to him about the building, offers him information, and drinks are on their way up. The title turns a life-and-death confrontation into a social call, which is precisely the joke Ausable himself is playing. Furthermore, there is a second midnight visitor in the story — Henry the waiter, who arrives unexpectedly at the door and, without knowing it, causes a man’s death. Reading the title as pointing at the waiter rather than the intruder gives your answer a genuinely original turn.

If asked to suggest an alternative title, offer something that captures the trick rather than the events — “The Balcony That Was Not There”, or “A Question of Nerve” — and then argue that the original is superior because it hides the twist instead of announcing it. Examiners like students who defend the author.

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The Midnight Visitor: Quick Revision Sheet

Use this the night before the exam, not instead of the sections above. Revision sheets are for refreshing knowledge you already have; they cannot install knowledge you never built.

Author: Robert Arthur. Setting: a small hotel in France; Ausable’s cramped room on the sixth floor; one window; night.

Characters in one line each:

• Ausable — a secret agent; very fat; American accent despite twenty-odd years in France; calm, inventive, an excellent judge of people; wins without force.
• Fowler — a young writer; romantic expectations of espionage; disappointed at first, terrified in the middle, astonished at the end; the reader’s stand-in.
• Max — a small, dark rival agent; armed; tense and impatient; believes the balcony story and dies.
• Henry — the hotel waiter; brings the drinks Ausable ordered; his knock, mistaken for the police, triggers the climax.

The chain of events, in six links: return to the room → Max waiting with a pistol → Ausable complains about a non-existent balcony → Ausable claims he has called the police → a knock, named as the police → Max climbs out and falls six floors; the knock was the waiter.

Themes: presence of mind defeats force; appearances deceive; fear ruins judgement; the romantic idea of adventure versus its reality; preparation beats improvisation.

Techniques: one withheld fact sustains all the suspense; the triple-meaning knock; situational, dramatic and verbal irony; understated, dry humour; a twist that is fully prepared for.

Three sentences worth carrying into the hall:

1. Ausable defeats Max without touching him, using nothing but a calmly delivered lie.
2. The balcony is invented before the knock arrives, so the trap is built before the trigger appears.
3. Max himself states the truth — that there is no balcony — and then talks himself out of believing it.

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A Question of Trust: The Story in Simple Words

Now for the second story, and I want you to notice something as we go: it is the same machine as the first one, running in the opposite direction. In The Midnight Visitor, the calm talker was the hero. Here, the calm talker is the thief. Same trick, different moral colour. Hold that thought.

Meet Horace Danby. Horace is around fifty years old and unmarried. He makes locks for a living and is good at it, with two assistants working under him and a housekeeper who looks after his home. Everyone who knows him thinks him a decent, respectable man. He is healthy, apart from an attack of hay fever every summer, which will matter more than you would expect.

His secret. Horace loves rare and expensive books. He loves them so much that, since a locksmith’s income cannot pay for them, he has developed a private arrangement with his conscience: once a year, exactly once, he robs a safe. He takes enough to fund a comfortable year of collecting, then buys the books he wants through an agent so that nobody can trace him. He had been caught once, fifteen years earlier, and served a short sentence — but he has been careful ever since.

This year’s target. The house is called Shotover Grange. Horace has done his homework thoroughly: two full weeks of study. He knows the family are away in London, he knows the servants have gone out to the cinema, and he knows there is a dog in the house named Sherry. He knows the jewels are in a safe hidden behind a painting. He has the tools, and, being a locksmith, he has the skill.

Everything goes to plan — briefly. He gets inside without difficulty. And then his hay fever betrays him: the flowers in the room set him sneezing. A voice speaks. A young woman in a red dress is standing there, entirely at ease, and she talks to him as though the house belongs to her.

The conversation that ruins him. She is not frightened. She is amused. She tells him she is the lady of the house, come down unexpectedly, and she treats his burglary as an inconvenient social situation rather than a crime in progress. She talks about calling the police. Then she offers him a way out: she needs her jewels for a party that evening, her husband keeps the combination of the safe, and if Horace opens it for her she will let him walk away. Relieved and grateful, he agrees. In the warmth of that conversation, working comfortably rather than criminally, he opens the safe without his gloves on.

The bill arrives. She takes the jewels and goes. Horace goes home pleased with his escape. Two days later the police arrest him. The real owners had returned, found the safe empty, and found something else: Horace’s fingerprints, all over the room and the safe.

Nobody believes him. In court Horace tells the exact truth — that a young woman in a red dress had asked him to open the safe. The actual lady of Shotover Grange turns out to be a grey-haired woman of sixty, who has certainly never worn any such dress and has certainly never met him. Horace’s story sounds like the pathetic invention of a caught thief. He is convicted.

The ending. Horace is now in prison, working as an assistant in the prison library. He is a mild man in most respects, but he loses his temper completely whenever anyone mentions honour among thieves.

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A Question of Trust: Horace Danby as a Character

Horace is a genuinely interesting character because he is a contradiction that he himself has never noticed. Victor Canning presents him as a good man and a thief in the same breath, and the comedy of the story comes from Horace being entirely comfortable with that arrangement.

Work through his qualities like this:

• Outwardly respectable. He is about fifty, unmarried, runs a lock-making business with two men working for him, and keeps a housekeeper. People who know him think well of him. He has a settled, ordinary life.
• Highly skilled and meticulous. He is a locksmith, so safes hold no mystery for him, and he plans with real care — two weeks of study before entering Shotover Grange, knowledge of the family’s absence, the servants’ cinema outing, the dog and the safe behind the painting. He is a professional in every sense.
• Disciplined rather than greedy. One robbery a year, and no more. He takes what he needs to fund his collecting and stops. This restraint is what allows him to think of himself as a decent person.
• Self-deceiving. Here is the crucial one. Horace does not consider himself a criminal. He considers himself a book lover with an unusual financing method. He is a thief who has convinced himself that he is not really a thief, and that comfortable self-image is exactly what the young woman exploits.
• Trusting and eager to be liked. The moment the woman is friendly rather than frightened, Horace relaxes. He wants her approval. He thanks her. He works for her. A harder man would have wondered why the mistress of a house does not know her own safe combination; Horace simply feels lucky.
• Sentimental and a little vain. He is pleased with his own cleverness and pleased with his own good nature. Both feelings blind him.

Let me offer an analogy for the self-deception, because it is the point students find hardest. Think of somebody who copies homework and tells themselves it is “just checking answers”, or someone who takes a friend’s stationery and calls it “borrowing indefinitely”. The action is dishonest; the label is comfortable. Horace has done this on a much larger scale for many years, and it works so well that he is genuinely wounded when the world treats him as what he is. His fury at the end of the story about honour among thieves is the sound of a man discovering he has been living inside a story he wrote himself.

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A Question of Trust: The Mysterious Young Lady

She has no name. She appears for a few pages. She never returns. And she is, without question, the most competent person in the story.

Let us assemble what we actually know about her, because a surprising number of exam answers invent details that are not in the text.

• She is young and wears a bright red dress.
• She appears in the house after Horace has broken in, and she is entirely unsurprised and unafraid to find a burglar there.
• She speaks and behaves as though she is the mistress of Shotover Grange, and Horace accepts this without hesitation.
• She threatens him with the police, then offers mercy on a condition.
• She says she needs her own jewels for a party that evening and cannot open the safe herself, since her husband keeps the combination.
• She leaves with the jewels.
• The real mistress of the house is later shown to be an elderly, grey-haired woman — so the young lady was never who she claimed to be.

From these facts we can infer her method, and inference is exactly what a good answer does. She is a thief who arrived to rob the same house on the same night, found it already occupied by a professional, and instantly improvised a better plan than her original one: let the other burglar do the technical work, take the goods, and leave him holding the evidence. That is not merely clever. It is ruthless, and it is executed without a single raised voice.

Her real skill is psychological. Notice what she does not do. She does not scream. She does not run. She does not threaten violence. Instead she makes Horace comfortable — and a comfortable man is a careless man. She converts a hostile situation into a friendly transaction, and the moment Horace stops feeling like a criminal in someone else’s house, he stops behaving like one. The gloves come off. That single relaxation costs him years of his life.

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A Question of Trust: How Horace Is Outwitted, Step by Step

As with the first story, this is the section that carries the long answers. Let us slow the encounter right down, because the trap is built out of very small moves and students who rush it lose marks for vagueness.

Step one: he prepares perfectly. Two weeks of observation. Family in London, servants at the cinema, dog accounted for, safe located behind a painting, tools ready. There is no fault in Horace’s professional work at any point in this story, and your answer should say so, because it makes what follows far more interesting.

Step two: he is exposed by his own body. The flowers in the room bring on his hay fever and he sneezes. This is a lovely piece of writing: the man who has controlled every external variable is betrayed by an internal one he cannot control. Note the neat symmetry — his professional strength is planning, and the thing that undoes him is the one thing that could not be planned.

Step three: she appears, and refuses to be frightened. A young woman in a red dress walks in and speaks to him calmly. This is the hinge of the entire story. Because she is not afraid, Horace concludes that she must have a right to be there. Fear would have marked her as a victim; calm marks her as an owner. It is precisely the same logic Ausable used on Max, and it works just as well.

Step four: she establishes power gently. She mentions the police. She does not shout for them, she does not run to a telephone; she simply lets the possibility sit in the air. Horace’s mind fills with prison, and once he is imagining prison, anything that is not prison starts to look like generosity.

Step five: she offers the deal. She wants her jewels for a party this evening. Her husband keeps the combination. Open the safe for her and she will forget she ever saw him. Look at how much this small speech accomplishes: it explains why she needs him, it confirms her identity as the lady of the house, it gives him a way out, and it makes him feel useful rather than caught.

Step six: he relaxes, and the gloves come off. This is the sentence that sends Horace to prison. Working now as a helper rather than a burglar, comfortable in a friendly conversation, he opens the safe with bare hands and moves about the room without the caution he began with. Fingerprints go everywhere. Notice the psychology: he did not forget the gloves through carelessness, he abandoned them because he had stopped feeling like a criminal. The mood she created did the damage, not his memory.

Step seven: the trap closes days later. She takes the jewels and leaves. He goes home believing he has had a narrow escape. Two days afterwards the police arrive, because the owners have come home to an empty safe and a room covered in one man’s fingerprints. In court he tells the truth, and the truth sounds absurd, because the actual mistress of the house is an elderly woman who has never laid eyes on him.

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A Question of Trust: The Irony of the Title

This is the most rewarding title in your Footprints Without Feet book, because it works in at least four directions at once. Take them one at a time and you will never be short of material.

Direction one: Horace trusts the young lady. The obvious reading. He accepts her claim to be the mistress of the house on nothing but her manner, and that trust destroys him. A thief, of all people, has no business trusting a stranger — and yet he does.

Direction two: the young lady trusts nobody, and wins. Set beside Horace, she is the story’s argument for the opposite policy. She gives away nothing, verifies nothing about him because she needs nothing from him except his skill, and walks away untouched. The story is uncomfortably honest about this: trust is punished and calculation is rewarded.

Direction three: the court will not trust Horace. He finally tells the exact truth, and the truth is the one thing nobody believes. There is real bitterness in this. A man who has spent his life presenting a false face discovers that when he finally shows a true one, he has spent all his credit.

Direction four: honour among thieves. The story’s closing joke — Horace losing his temper whenever the phrase is mentioned — makes explicit what the whole plot has been arguing. He had assumed, without ever examining it, that a fellow criminal would deal fairly with him. She never promised any such thing. He trusted a convention that does not exist.

There is one more layer worth a sentence in a strong answer. The title also asks a question about us. Every reader, watching the scene, wants Horace to be safe, likes the young woman, and enjoys the conversation. We are taken in exactly as he is. The story tests the reader’s judgement as much as the character’s.

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Related chapter: try another prose chapter, Mijbil the Otter.

A Question of Trust: Themes

Five themes, each stated as a claim you could argue with, each with its evidence attached.

1. Misplaced trust is more dangerous than an enemy. Nobody hunts Horace. No detective outwits him. He hands himself over because he believed a stranger’s manner. The story’s cool suggestion is that we are usually undone not by attacks but by the people we decide, on no evidence, are safe.

2. Crime is not a stable identity but a habit that grows comfortable. Horace has arranged his life so that he can steal without feeling like a thief — one robbery a year, no violence, books rather than luxury, purchases made quietly through an agent. The story dismantles that arrangement by showing him what a real thief looks like: she is charming, prepared to sacrifice him, and entirely unsentimental. He has been playing at a profession she is actually in.

3. There is no honour among thieves. This is stated openly at the end and it is worth quoting the idea in your answers. Horace’s rage in the prison library is not really about the woman; it is about the discovery that a rule he had relied upon was never a rule at all.

4. Truth is not automatically believed. The court scene is short but pointed. What convinces people is plausibility, not accuracy, and Horace’s true account is wildly implausible. A student sitting an exam might reasonably take a practical lesson from this: evidence, not sincerity, is what persuades.

5. Small weaknesses defeat large strengths. A fortnight of planning is destroyed by hay fever and good manners. Canning is making a quietly comic point about human beings: our elaborate systems are usually undone by something embarrassingly ordinary.

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A Question of Trust: Humour and Narrative Technique

Victor Canning’s story is funny, and its humour is worth understanding because “how does the writer create humour” is a question students often meet with a blank page.

Humour from the mismatch between crime and character. Almost every laugh in the story comes from the gap between what Horace is doing and how he thinks about it. A man breaks into a country house to steal jewels — and does it to buy books. He is a criminal with a housekeeper. He is a burglar whose main annoyance in life is hay fever. Canning keeps placing the machinery of crime next to the furniture of respectable middle-aged life, and the collision is comic.

Humour from the sneeze. The dignity of the professional thief is punctured by the most undignified possible noise. There is a long comic tradition of large plans being ruined by tiny bodily failures, and Canning uses it perfectly.

Humour from the politeness of the encounter. A burglary turns into a conversation. Two people who should be screaming at each other instead negotiate like acquaintances at a tea party. This civility, in a scene that ought to be violent, is the same comic device Robert Arthur uses when Ausable complains about hotel management at gunpoint.

Humour from the ending. The last note is a genuine joke: the swindled swindler, sitting in a prison library, going red in the face at the phrase honour among thieves. It is funny, and it is also sad, and Canning lets it be both.

Narrative technique — four things you can name.

• The omniscient third-person narrator with access to Horace’s mind. We are told what Horace thinks and feels, and this is essential, because the trick only works if we experience his relief and gratitude as he does. We are fooled with him.
• Selective concealment. The narrator knows the young woman is not who she says she is, and simply does not tell us. Nothing false is stated; something true is withheld. That is how a fair twist is built.
• Compression of time at the end. The break-in takes pages; the arrest, trial and imprisonment take a few lines. This rush at the close makes the consequences feel sudden and inescapable, mirroring how they must have felt to Horace.
• The ironic final image. Ending on the prison library rather than on the trial gives the story its lasting flavour. A book lover surrounded by books, unable to buy a single one — the punishment fits the passion exactly.

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A Question of Trust: Quick Revision Sheet

Author: Victor Canning. Setting: Shotover Grange, an English country house; a summer evening; later, a courtroom and a prison.

Characters in one line each:

• Horace Danby — about fifty, unmarried, a locksmith with two assistants and a housekeeper; suffers from hay fever; loves rare books; robs one safe a year to pay for them; trusting, gentle, self-deceiving.
• The young lady in the red dress — unnamed; young, calm, charming; pretends to be the mistress of the house; almost certainly a thief herself; escapes with the jewels.
• The real mistress of Shotover Grange — grey-haired, about sixty; her existence in court destroys Horace’s defence.
• Sherry — the house dog, part of the security Horace had studied and prepared for.

The chain of events, in seven links: two weeks of planning → entry while the family are in London and the servants at the cinema → hay fever makes him sneeze → the young woman appears and is not afraid → she hints at the police, then offers a deal → he opens the safe without gloves → she leaves with the jewels; two days later his fingerprints convict him.

Themes: misplaced trust; the self-deception of the comfortable criminal; the myth of honour among thieves; truth is not automatically believed; small weaknesses defeat large plans.

Techniques: third-person narration inside Horace’s mind so the reader is deceived with him; a twist built by withholding rather than lying; compressed ending; the ironic final image of the prison library.

Three sentences worth carrying into the hall:

1. Nobody detects Horace — he is robbed by a rival thief and left holding the evidence.
2. The gloves come off because he stops feeling like a criminal, and that single relaxation convicts him.
3. He tells the truth in court and it sounds like a lie, because the real lady of the house is sixty and grey-haired.

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Related chapter: revise From the Diary of Anne Frank for the same question pattern.

Comparing the Two Stories

Here is where the chapter pays you back for reading both stories together. Comparison questions are increasingly common, and students who have studied the stories separately find them frightening. You will not, because you are about to see how neatly they rhyme.

The shared machine. In both stories, one character defeats another using no force whatsoever, purely by saying something untrue in a completely convincing manner. Ausable invents a balcony; the young woman invents an identity. In both cases the lie is delivered calmly, and in both cases calmness is what makes it credible. And in both cases the victim performs the fatal action himself — Max jumps, Horace opens the safe. The winner never lifts a finger.

The shared vulnerability. Both victims are defeated through an emotion rather than a lack of skill. Max is undone by fear; Horace by gratitude. Neither is stupid. Both are simply feeling something strongly at the moment when they most needed to be thinking coldly.

The crucial difference: who is the trickster? This is the point that makes a comparison answer sing. In The Midnight Visitor, the trickster is the hero, and his deception saves a life and an important report; we cheer. In A Question of Trust, the trickster is a thief, her deception ruins a man and enriches her, and we are left uneasy. The same skill is admirable in one story and chilling in the other, which suggests that cleverness itself is morally neutral — what matters is the purpose it serves.

A second difference: the shape of justice. The Midnight Visitor ends tidily. The threat is removed, the report is safe, drinks are poured. A Question of Trust ends crookedly. The person who actually took the jewels goes free, and the person who is punished is guilty of something else. One story satisfies our sense of fairness; the other deliberately frustrates it.

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Character Sketch Writing: A Reusable Method

Character sketches appear in almost every Literature paper, and most students write them badly for a single reason: they narrate the story with the character’s name attached, instead of describing a person. Here is a method you can use for Ausable, Horace, the young lady, Max, Fowler — or, in fact, for any character in any chapter of your course.

The five-paragraph frame.

1. Placement. One or two sentences: who the character is, what they do, where they appear. “Horace Danby is a middle-aged locksmith who lives a quiet, respectable life and robs one safe a year.”
2. Dominant trait with proof. Name the single most important quality and prove it with one incident. Do not list five adjectives here; choose one and support it properly.
3. Second trait with proof. Ideally a trait that complicates the first. Ausable is calm and ruthless. Horace is careful and gullible. Contradiction makes a character sound real and shows the examiner you are thinking.
4. The turning point. What does the character do at the decisive moment, and what does that choice reveal? This is the paragraph that separates good scripts from ordinary ones, because it treats the character as someone who makes decisions rather than someone things happen to.
5. Evaluation. One or two sentences of judgement. What does this character represent? What can a reader take from them? Never end a character sketch on plot; always end on meaning.

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Extract and Value-Based Questions: A Safe Method

Two question types worry students more than they should. Let us take away the mystery.

Extract-based questions. You are given a short passage from the story and asked two or three questions about it. Students panic because they think they must recognise the exact lines from memory. You do not. Follow this order instead:

1. Read the extract twice before looking at the questions. Thirty seconds spent here saves two minutes later.
2. Place it. Ask yourself: who is speaking, to whom, and at what point in the story? Almost every extract question secretly tests this. For these two chapters the candidates are limited — Ausable with Fowler, Ausable with Max, Horace alone in the Grange, Horace with the young woman, the courtroom, the prison — so you can usually place an extract in seconds.
3. Answer only what is asked. Extract questions are short-mark questions. One or two sentences each. Resist the urge to write everything you know.
4. Use the extract’s own facts. If the passage mentions the window, mention the window. Anchoring your answer in the given text is what the question is testing.

Value-based questions. These ask what a character or event teaches us, or which values the story supports. The trap is writing a general moral essay that could have been written without reading the chapter. Avoid it by following three rules:

• Name the value in the first sentence. Presence of mind. Honesty with oneself. Caution with strangers. Do not build up to it.
• Prove it from the story before you generalise. One incident, described precisely.
• Then, and only then, extend it to life. One or two sentences, and make them concrete. “Students should stay calm in examinations” is fine but flat. “When a question looks unfamiliar, the useful response is Ausable’s: slow down, read it again, and act on thought rather than on the first surge of panic” is far better, because it applies the story rather than merely borrowing a moral.

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Common Mistakes Students Make

I have collected the errors that come up most often when students write on these two stories. Read this list once now and once more the night before your exam. Every item here is a mark you can save without learning anything new.

1. Retelling instead of answering. The commonest error by a distance. The question asks why Max believed the balcony story; the script tells the whole plot from Ausable’s front door. Answer the question that was asked, in its own words, in your first sentence.

2. Saying the balcony was “broken” or “small”. There was no balcony at all. This sounds obvious, but a surprising number of answers imply the balcony existed and was simply unsafe. Be unambiguous: it was entirely imaginary.

3. Confusing the sneeze with the conviction. The sneeze reveals Horace to the young woman. The fingerprints convict him. Two separate events, two separate causes.

4. Believing the young woman really lived at Shotover Grange. She did not. The real mistress of the house is elderly and grey-haired, and this is established in the courtroom. If your answer treats her as the genuine owner who let a burglar go, you have misread the story’s whole point.

5. Writing that the police caught Horace at the house. He walked out freely and was arrested two days later, once the owners returned and the fingerprints were found. The delay matters, because it shows how completely he thought he had escaped.

6. Forgetting that Ausable ordered the drinks. The knock is only a fair twist because we were told earlier that drinks were coming. Mentioning this in a technique answer shows you noticed the author’s craft.

7. Turning characters into cardboard. Max is not simply stupid; Horace is not simply wicked; Fowler is not simply silly. Each has a specific, human reason for behaving as he does. Answers that name the reason score; answers that name a label do not.

8. Ignoring word limits in both directions. A two-mark answer written across a page wastes time you will need later; a five-mark answer of forty words cannot possibly contain five marks’ worth of ideas. Match the length to the marks.

9. Moralising without evidence. Ending a value-based answer with “so we should always be honest” adds nothing if the preceding lines contain no incident from the text. Values must grow out of evidence, not replace it.

10. Leaving out the ending of A Question of Trust. The prison library and Horace’s rage at the idea of honour among thieves are the story’s final irony, and many answers stop at the arrest. Those last few lines are frequently where the marks for insight sit.

11. Mixing up the two stories under pressure. It happens more often than you would think, because both feature a calm deceiver and an unsuspecting victim. Fix the pairs firmly in your memory: Ausable and Max in a French hotel; Horace and the young lady at an English country house.

12. Writing “the author wants to say” repeatedly. It is filler. State the point directly. “Canning shows that…” or simply “The story argues that…” is stronger and shorter.

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Practice Worksheet

Ten questions, mixed exactly as a board paper mixes them. Please do this properly: cover the answers, write your responses on paper, and only then open the reveals. If you simply read the answers, you will feel prepared and will not be. Give yourself about forty-five minutes for the whole set.

Now score yourself honestly. Do not award a mark for an answer that was “nearly right” — that habit is how students walk out of an exam certain they scored twenty more marks than they did. Count only what you actually wrote.

And here is the only progress rule that has ever mattered: aim for one more correct question than yesterday. Not ten more. One. If you managed six of these today, target seven on your next attempt, and eight after that. Small, stubborn, daily improvement will carry you further than any single heroic night of study ever could — and unlike the heroic night, it still works when you are tired.