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me.”
    “No
questions or stalling?”
    “No.
It was just like buying a toothbrush or anything else.”
    “Didn’t
he seem to be at all interested in who was buying it?”
    “Not
a bit.”
    He held the
package to his ear, shook it, and crunched it speculatively.
    “We’ll
have a drink somewhere and see if we’ve won any thing,” he said.
    At a
secluded corner table in the Florida, a while later, he opened the
packet, with the same care to preserve the seals and wrappings as he
had given to the first consignment, and tipped out the
contents on to a plate. The contents, to any ordinary examination,
consisted of nothing but tea—and, by the smell and feel of it, not very good
tea either.
    The Saint
sighed, and called a waiter to remove the mess.
    “It looks as if we were
wrong about that eccentric million aire,”
he said. “Or else the supply of doremi has run out…. Well, I suppose we shall just have to go to work
again.” He folded the container
and stowed it carefully away in his pocket; and if he was disappointed
he was able to conceal his grief. A glimmer
of reckless optimism curled the corners of his mouth. “You know, darling, I have a hunch that some interesting
things are going to happen before this time to morrow night.”
    He was a
better prophet than he knew, and it took only a few hours to prove
it.   
     
    V
    S IMON T EMPLAR slept like a child. A
thunderstorm bursting over his roof would not
have woken him; a herd of wild elephants stampeding past his bed would
scarcely have made him stir; but one kind of
noise that other ears might not have
heard at all even in full wakefulness brought him back instantaneously to life
with every faculty sharpened and on tiptoe.
    He awoke in
a breathless flash, like a watchdog, without the slightest perceptible
alteration in his rate of breathing or any sudden movement.
Anyone standing over him would not have even sensed the change that had taken place. But his eyes were half open, and his wits were skidding
back over the last split second of sleep like the recoil of taut elastic, searching for a definition of the sound that had
aroused him.
    The
luminous face of a clock across the room told him that he had slept
less than two hours. And the thinly phos phorescent hands
hadn’t moved on enough for the naked eye to see when he knew why he was
awake.
    In the
adjoining living-room, something human had moved.
    Simon drew
down the automatic from under his pillow and slid out of bed
like a phantom. He left the communicating door alone, and
sidled noiselessly through the other door which led out into the
hall. The front door was open just enough to split the darkness with a
knife-edge of illumina tion from the lights on the landing outside:
he eased over to it like a cat, slipped his fingers through the gap,
and felt the burred edges of the hole which had been drilled
through the outside of the frame so that the catch of the spring lock would be
pushed back.
    A light
blinked beyond the open door of the living-room. The Saint came to the entrance
and looked in. Silhouetted against the subdued glow of an electric torch
he saw the shape of a man standing by the table with his back to the door, and his bare feet padded over the carpet without a breath of
sound until they were almost under the intruder’s heels. He leaned over
until his lips were barely a couple of inches from the
visitor’s right ear.
    “Boo,”
said the Saint.
    It was
perhaps fortunate for the intruder that he had a strong heart, for if
he had had the slightest cardiac weakness the nervous shock
which spun him round would have probably popped it like a balloon. As it was,
an involuntary yammer of sheer primitive fright dribbled out of his
throat before he lashed out blindly in no less instinctive self- defence.
    Simon had
anticipated that. He was crouching almost to his knees by that
time, and his left arm snaked around the lower part of the
man’s legs simultaneously with a quick thrust of his