"I'll come with you."

The Saint grimaced.   •

Patricia Holm, he used to say, had given him two white hairs for every day he had known her. Even since a memorable day in Devonshire, when he had first met her, and the hectic days which followed, when she had joined him in the hunting of the man who was called the Tiger, the Saint had been forc­ing himself to realise that to try and keep the girl out of trou­ble was a hopeless task. By this time he was getting resigned to her. She was a law unto herself. She was of a mettle so utterly different to that of any girl he had ever dreamed of, a mettle so much finer and fiercer, that if she had not been so paradox­ically feminine with it he would have sworn that she ought to have been a man. She was—well, she was Patricia Holm, and that was that. . . .

"O.K., kid," said the Saint helplessly.

But already she was standing beside him. With a shrug, the Saint climbed back into his seat and moved the car on half a dozen yards so that the lights could not be seen from the house. Then he rejoined her at the corner of the lane.

They went down the lane together.

The house stood in a hedged garden thickly grown with trees. The Saint, searching warily, found the alarm on the gate, and disconnected it with an expert hand before he lifted the latch and let Patricia through to the lawn. From there, looking upwards, they could see that queer, bleak light still glimmer­ing behind the blinds of the upper window.

The front of the house was in darkness, and the ground-floor windows closed and apparently secured.