Archie was voluble about this non-essential in face of the personal tragedy, anxious to state his theory of the disaster, because he had more than an uncomfortable consciousness of what the servants and the men on the place were saying about it. And that was that the master himself had set the house on fire. It had started in the large, empty drawing-room, in which the decorators had been still working with paints, oils, and inflammable stuff. The workmen, however, had not been in the room for hours before the fire started. The only person who had entered it during the evening was Archie himself, for it was on his way from his library to his suite of rooms in the other wing. He had sat up late as usual after the guests had gone, smoking and drinking by himself, then had stumbled drowsily through the house to his bedroom, and on the way doubtless had dropped a match or lighted cigar in the drawing-room, and in his fuddled condition had failed to notice what he had done. The first person to discover the fire had happened to be Tom Clark, who had been returning late from the village to his shack on the hill, and had seen an unnatural glow through the long French windows of the drawing-room. By the time he had roused the house servants in their remote quarters and set off for the garage to summon help, the drawing-room and the adjoining hall were a mass of flame. When he returned with the new hose-cart and helpers the servants had already opened the large front door, admitting the wind, which blew the fire through the stairway like a bellows and completed the destruction of the house. Clark knew as well as Ferguson, the superintendent, and a half-dozen others, that when Archie emerged from his rooms on the ground floor, he was not fully undressed: though it was past one in the morning, he had not yet gone to bed. And although no one said anything, habitually cautious as such people usually are when indiscretion may involve them with their masters, they had easily made the correct deductions about the cause of the fire.... When Archie came from the orangery, he saw Clark standing on the terrace beside the ruins, examining the scene of his already famous exploit of the night before. He may well have been wondering how he had ever succeeded in keeping his balance and in crawling like a fly over the surface of the wall he had helped to put up. There were a number of other people loitering about the ruins, some of them from neighboring estates, who had motored over to offer help and lingered to discuss the disaster. Archie joined a group of these, among whom was the stone mason. He was feeling unhappy about many things, especially about his responsibility for the fire. He began to talk out his theory, turning first to Clark. "You didn't happen to see any of the men hanging about the place when you came up last night?" he asked. "No," the mason replied shortly.