The Saint turned on the terrace and looked back into the room. He was still debonair and smiling, and although the shrubbery had given the _coup de grace_ to his ancient and disreputably comfortable clothes, he contrived by some subtle gift of personality to look immaculate enough to wander into Claridge’s without the commissionaire spotting him and shooing him round to the tradesman’s entrance. Only the Saint knew what an effort that air of careless ease cost him. The atmosphere was positively dripping with the smell of rats, but Simon Templar never twitched a nostril. “Comrade?” “It might save you spending a sleepless night, and catching your death of cold,” observed Bittle, “if I told you that the Tiger has already left. So you needn’t bother to hang about outside.” “Thanks,” said the Saint. “I won’t. And it might save you a longish walk and a lot of trouble if I told you that Orace and I sleep in watches, turn and turn about, so that any of your pals who call round in the hope of being able to catch us napping will have to be very fly. . . . S’long!” He vanished into the darkness like a wraith, almost before the men in the library could have realised that he was gone. He went scraping through the shrubbery again to the wall, got his coat over the top as before, and was over like a cat. He dropped lightly to the ground, pulled on the tattered coat, and struck off away from the wall after no more than a couple of seconds’ pause to listen and scan the blackness in every direction. Guided by an innate bump of locality, he established his bearings at once and set off on a wide detour that would bring him eventually into the grounds at the back of the Manor. He advanced in short rushes, stopping and crouching in cover every twenty yards or so, straining eyes and ears for sign of stalkers behind or an ambush before. Nothing happened. The night was quiet and peaceful. He saw a light go on in an upper window of Bittle’s house, and the distant hiss of the surf mingled with the rustle of grasses brushed by the breeze, but there was neither sight nor sound of any human being. “Damned odd!” said Templar to himself, scratching his head, as he lay under a hedge, watching and listening like a frontiersman, after at least a dozen of these rushes. “Flaming odd! Or did I slip them by going over the wall?” He had fully expected to find some spicy parting gift waiting for him as soon as he had got far enough away from Bittle’s vicinity, when they would be hoping to take him off his guard, but nothing had interfered with his departure, and there had been no trace of even the feeblest attempt to create trouble for him when he arrived in the narrow lane that ran between the Manor and Carn’s house. “Hell!” said the Saint, almost indignantly. “Now, why in blazes did they want to let me go?”