gray silk ballooned and rose and fell. But the sound of running feet warned Hubbard not to pause. He strode quickly down the flagged path, shot the catch of the wrought-[Pg 20]iron gate in the faces of the too curious, and then hurried into the house again. He addressed Rooke, who stood by the group of shocked women.

[Pg 20]

"Here, you seem to know this house pretty well. How do we get up there?" he asked.

"Bathroom window, I should think," Rooke replied. "This way."

The bathroom lay at the end of a short passage on the floor above. The three of us dashed upstairs. Rooke tried the bathroom door, but found it locked. "Damn!" he muttered, and then I reminded him that possibly he had the key of it in his pocket.

It was oddly irritating to watch him try first one key and then another. We wanted to tell him to make haste, as if he could have made any greater haste than he was doing. Then luckily he hit on the right one. The door opened, we sprang across the cork-covered floor, and Rooke began to tug at the window-catch. The window was one of these late-Victorian windows with a colored border and white incised stars, and already the tragic huddle a dozen yards away could be seen, violently crimson through the red squares and morbidly blue through the blue ones.

Then, as the sash flew up, all was sunshine again, and the wrecked parachute and the two men enwrapped in its folds could be seen only too clearly.

Monty Rooke had a new silver-gray suit on that morning, but already he had thrown one leg over the sill.

"I'm not so heavy as you fellows," he muttered. "I'm not so sure about this gutter—give me a hand while I try it. Then I can shin up that spout over there."

Hubbard took the small, nervous hand in his own[Pg 21] beefy fist and let him down three or four feet. "All right," said Rooke, after a moment's trial; and, spread-eagled out on the annexe roof, he began to make his way towards the higher roof of the studio beyond.

[Pg 21]

"Tapes oughtn't to have fouled like that," I heard the Commander say under his breath as we watched. "Parachuting's safe enough if you're any height at all. This breeze, I suppose, and risking the double load. Wonder they didn't go slap through."

It was, indeed, merely by inches 

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