gathered together near Simon's car. There was a tall red-faced man with a white moustache and the stereotyped chutney-and-scotch complexion of a professional soldier, a dour large-bosomed woman in a flannel dressing gown who could have belonged to nobody else, an excited little fat man who came chattering pompously, the guardsmanly youth who had herded them together, and a fourth man who strolled up in the background. The reflection of the fire shone redly in their faces as they assembled in a group with an air of . studied calm which proclaimed their consciousness of behaving like British aristocrats in an emergency.
Simon looked them over without reverence. He knew none of them by sight, and it was none of his business, but he was the only one present who seemed to have any coherent ideas. His voice stilled their chatter.
'Well,' he said, 'you ought to know. Are you all here?'
They glanced at each other in an awed and scared sort of way and then turned and looked frightenedly at the blazing house and back again, as though it were the first time that any of their thoughts had gone beyond their own personal safety.
Suddenly the voice of the girl in the nightgown sounded shrilly behind Simon.
'No! They aren't all here! John isn't here! Where's Johnny?'
There was an awful stillness, in which realization crawled horribly over chalky faces.
'B-but where can he be?' asked the short fat man in a quavering voice. 'He—he must have heard the alarm——'
The military-looking man turned round and raised his voice in a barrack-square bawl.
'Kennet!' he shouted.
He sounded as if he were bellowing at a slovenly recruit who was late on parade.
The only answer was the derisive cackle of the leaping flames.
The large-bosomed woman shrieked. She opened her mouth wide and yelled at the top of her voice, her face contorted with an awful terror.
'No! No! It's too dreadful. He can't be still in there! You can't have——'
Her words broke off in a kind of gulp. For a couple of seconds her mouth went on opening and shutting like that of a fish out of water; then, without another sound, she collapsed like an empty sack.
'She's fainted,' somebody said stupidly.
'So she has,' said the Saint witheringly. 'Now we all ought to gather round and hold her hands.'
The military man, bending over her, turned up his purple face.
'By Gad, sir!' he burst out cholerically. 'Haven't you——' He stopped. Another thought, overwhelming in its enormity, seemed to have erupted under his nose. He straightened up, glaring at the Saint as if he had just really become aware of his presence for the first time. 'Anyway,' he said, 'what the devil are you doing here?'
The idea percolated into the brains of the others and brought them back to gaping stillness. And while they were staring in vacuous indignation, the man who had stayed in the background moved to the front. He was short and very broad shouldered, with a square and rather flat face and very sunken shrewd dark eyes. Unlike the others, he was fully dressed. There was no sign of flurry or alarm about him; with his powerful chin and thin straight mouth he looked as solid and impassive as a chunk of granite.
'Yes,' he said, 'who are you?'
Simon met his gaze with cold insouciance. The antagonism was instant and intuitive. Perhaps it was that that touched the Saint's
