Evidently the caution was necessary, for a minute or so after they had
passed on and disappeared behind the door leading to the kitchen
stairway, Petrie and his colleagues heard a sound as of something being
overturned and smashed, and laughed softly to themselves. Evidently,
too, the danger of the furnace had been grossly exaggerated by Sir
Horace, for when, a few minutes later, the door opened and closed, and
Narkom's men, glancing toward it, saw the figure of their chief
reappear, it was plain that he was in no good temper, since his features
were knotted up into a scowl, and he swore audibly as he snapped the
shutter over the bull's-eye and handed it back to Petrie.

"Nothing worth looking into, superintendent?"

"No--not a thing!" he replied. "The silly old josser! pulling me down
there amongst the coals and rubbish for an insane idea like that! Why,
the flues wouldn't admit the passage of a child; and even then, there's
a bend--an abrupt 'elbow'--that nothing but a cat could crawl up. And
that's a man who's an authority on the human brain! I sent the old silly
back to bed by the way he came, and if--"

There he stopped, stopped short, and sucked in his breath with a sharp,
wheezing sound. For, of a sudden, a swift pattering footfall and a
glimmer of moving light had sprung into being and drawn his eyes upward;
and there, overhead, was Miss Lome coming down the stairs from the upper
floor in a state of nervous excitement, and with a bedroom candle in her
shaking hand, a loose gown flung on over her nightdress, and her hair
streaming over her shoulders in glorious disarray.

He stood and looked at her, with ever-quickening breath, with