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slowly at his cigarette.
    “That could be swell,” he said; and her eyes turned to his face again.
    “I’ll have to make a phone call and break another date,” she said with a smile. “But it doesn’t seem to matter a bit.”
    He stood up while she left the table, and then he sat down again and propped his cigarette arm on one elbow for about as long as it took to absorb three more long and contemplative drags.
    Then he got up and strolled unhurriedly out of the restaurant.
    He strolled past the bar, past the men’s room, past the hat-check girl. There was an elevator engorging a flock of satisfied diners. Almost accidentally, it might have seemed, the Saint drifted in on the heels of the last passenger, and was dropped with ear-numbing swiftness to the street.
    Ten minutes later he was on the steps of Gabriel Linnet’s house again.
    This time he rang the bell.
    He rang it two or three times, but there was no response.
    He felt so still inside that he could hear his own pulses drumming. There might be some perfectly ordinary explanation for the fact that the house seemed empty. Yet Linnet had dined with the Ourleys the night before; and if he had been planning to close up his house and go away somewhere, Mrs Ourley would almost certainly have mentioned it. And unless Mr Linnet was an eccentric who preferred to sweep his own floors and wash his own dishes, there should have been some servant on duty at that hour in a place that size.
    And of course Barbara Sinclair had always been too good to be true… .
    The Saint wondered if he deserved to be shot. But he was going to find out.
    He took a pin from his coat lapel and used it to jam the doorbell on a steady ring, and stepped back. It could have been a major operation to force that entrance, and a street front was not the ideal place for such operations at any time, but he had already noted a narrow alley that ran between the Chateau Linnet and its next-door neighbor, and if such an alley didn’t lead to a side entrance he couldn’t think of any other reason for it to be there.
    There was a side entrance, and like most side entrances it looked much less of a problem than the front door.
    The Saint cupped his pencil flashlight vinder his hands for a preliminary diagnosis of the lock.
    And as he looked at it, it receded slowly before him.
    The movement was so gradual and stealthy that it didn’t register instantaneously. At first it could have been only an insignificant hallucination, an effect of the movement of the light in his hands. He had to become at first unthinkingly aware that the continuous pealing of the doorbell which could be heard somewhere inside the building was growing clearer and louder; and at the same time his brain had to consent to recognise the improbable report of his eyes; and then he had to put the two things together; and then the door had unquestionably opened more than an inch, and a gossamer commando of intangible cockroaches raced up from between his snoulder-bladcs into the roots of his hair.
    Somebody was opening the door from within.
    It was too late then to switch out the torch and duck—even if there had been anywhere to duck to. The glow of light must have already been distinctively perceptible from inside the opening door. And for final proof of that, the door started to close again.
    Simon’s shoulder hit it with all his weight in about the same split second as it reversed itself.
    The door traveled some six inches back, and thudded in a rather sharp crisp way against some obstacle which let out a sort of thin yipping cough. Then it went on with much less impetus, while a straggly tumbling effect peeled off behind it.
    Simon went in and shut the door behind him, flashing his light around even while he did that.
    He saw a short flight of steps with the temporary obstacle sprawled at the foot of them. The obstacle was a thin hollow-cheeked man who looked as if he had probably shaved two days before. If he hadn’t, he should