The second clause, however, was not important, for he proposed to tell her whose was the hand next morning.  Other people might hide their light under a bushel—­not George Emerson.

It only remained now to allow time to pass until the hour should be sufficiently advanced to insure safety for the expedition.  He looked at his watch again.  It was nearly two.  By this time the house must be asleep.

He gathered up the tongue, the bread, the knife, the fork, the salt, the corkscrew and the bottle of white wine, and left the room.  All was still.  He stole downstairs.

* * *

On his chair in the gallery that ran round the hall, swathed in an overcoat and wearing rubber-soled shoes, the Efficient Baxter sat and gazed into the darkness.  He had lost the first fine careless rapture, as it were, which had helped him to endure these vigils, and a great weariness was on him.  He found difficulty in keeping his eyes open, and when they were open the darkness seemed to press on them painfully.  Take him for all in all, the Efficient Baxter had had about enough of it.

Time stood still.  Baxter’s thoughts began to wander.  He knew that this was fatal and exerted himself to drag them back.  He tried to concentrate his mind on some one definite thing.  He selected the scarab as a suitable object, but it played him false.  He had hardly concentrated on the scarab before his mind was straying off to ancient Egypt, to Mr. Peters’ dyspepsia, and on a dozen other branch lines of thought.

He blamed the fat man at the inn for this.  If the fat man had not thrust his presence and conversation on him he would have been able to enjoy a sound sleep in the afternoon, and would have come fresh to his nocturnal task.  He began to muse on the fat man.  And by a curious coincidence whom should he meet a few moments later but this same man!

It happened in a somewhat singular manner, though it all seemed perfectly logical and consecutive to Baxter.  He was climbing up the outer wall of Westminster Abbey in his pyjamas and a tall hat, when the fat man, suddenly thrusting his head out of a window which Baxter had not noticed until that moment, said, “Hello, Freddie!”

Baxter was about to explain that his name was not Freddie when he found himself walking down Piccadilly with Ashe Marson.  Ashe said to him:  “Nobody loves me.  Everybody steals my grapefruit!” And the pathos of it cut the Efficient Baxter like a knife.  He was on the point of replying; when Ashe vanished and Baxter discovered that he was not in Piccadilly, as he had supposed, but in an aeroplane with Mr. Peters, hovering over the castle.

Mr. Peters had a bomb in his hand, which he was fondling with loving care.  He explained to Baxter that he had stolen it from the Earl of Emsworth’s museum.  “I did it with a slice of cold beef and a pickle,” he explained; and Baxter found himself realizing that that was the only way.  “Now watch me drop it,” said Mr. Peters, closing one eye and taking aim at the castle.  “I have to do this by the doctor’s orders.”