and when the door had closed again, he went to another bookcase and extracted a couple of dusty volumes. Reaching into the cavity behind the other books, he brought out an automatic pistol and a box of cartridges. The books he replaced. Carrying the gun over to the table, he first carefully tested the action and then loaded the magazine, bringing the first cartridge into the chamber and then thumbing in the safety catch.
With the gun in his pocket he experienced a slight feeling of relief.
But for hours afterwards he sat in the study, staring at the embers of the dying fire, sipping brandy and smoking cigarette after cigarette, till the fire died altogether, and he began to shiver as the room grew colder. And thus, alone, through those hours, he pondered fact upon fact, and formed and reviewed and discarded plan after plan, until at last he had shaped an idea with which his weary brain could at the moment find no fault.
It was a wild and desperate scheme, the kind of scheme which a man only forms after a sleepless night fortified with too many cigarettes and too much strong drink taken alone and in fear; but it was the only answer he could find to his problem. He was quite calm and decided about that. When at last he dragged himself to bed, he was more calm and cold and decided than he had ever been before in all his life, was Lord Essenden, that fussy and peevish little man.
2
Simon Templar picked up the sheet of paper on which he had been working spasmodically during the return from Paris, and cleared his throat.
'We understand,' he said, 'that the following lines have been awarded the Dumbbell Prize for Literature:
