swift mind with the queer itch of dissatisfaction that was to lead to so many things. Perhaps it was then that the first wraith of suspicion took nebulous shape in his mind. But there was no time to dwell on the point just then. He only knew that something like a fine thread of steel wove through the plastic outlines of his attitude.
'At the moment,' he said evenly, 'I seem to be the only person who isn't behaving like a stuffed owl. Where does this man Kennet sleep?'
'I don't know,' answered the square-built man. 'Someone else will be able to tell you.'
His face was expressionless; his tone was so expressionless as to sound almost ironical. There seemed to be a stony sort of amusement lurking at the back of his deep-set eyes. But that might have been an illusion created by the flickering firelight.
The girl Valerie supplied the information.
'He's in the end room on the left—that window there.'
Simon looked.
The room was at the end of the house which was burning most fiercely—the end close to which the fire had probably started. Under it, the ground floor looked like an open furnace through which the draught from the open windows and the open front door was driving flame in long roaring streamers. The end upper window was about fifteen feet from the ground, and there was no way of reaching it from outside without a ladder.
The fat little man was wringing his hands.
'He can't still be there,' he wailed. 'He must have heard the alarm——'
'Suppose he got the wind up and fainted or something?' suggested the large young man in the striped pajamas helpfully.
Simon almost hit him.
'Do you know where there's a ladder, you amazing oaf?' he demanded.
The young man blinked at him dumbly. Nobody else answered. They all seemed to be in a fog.
Simon swung round to Patricia.
'Do what you can, darling,' he said.
He turned away, and for a moment the others seemed to be held petrified.
'Stop him,' bleated the little fat man suddenly. 'For God's sake, stop him! It's suicide!'
'Hey!' bellowed the puce-faced militarist commandingly. 'Comeback!'
The queenly woman screeched indistinguishably and collapsed again,
Simon Templar heard none of these things. He was halfway across the lawn by that time, racing grimly towards the house.
3
The heat from the hall struck him like a physical blow as he plunged through the front door; the air scorched his lungs like a gust from a red-hot oven. At the far end of the hall long sheets of flame were sweeping greedily up a huge pair of velvet curtains. Smaller flames were dancing over a rug and leaping with fiercer eagerness up the blackening banisters of a wide staircase. The paint on the broad beams crossing the high ceiling was bubbling and boiling under the heat, and occasionally small drops of it fell in a scalding rain to take hold of new sections of the floor.
The Saint hardly checked for an instant before he went on. He dodged across the hall like a flitting shadow and leapt up the stairs four at a time. Fire from the banisters snatched at him as he went up, stung his
