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.