crawl,
he was able to move across the ground. It might have proved a
noisy business on a parquet floor; but Desmond moved only a foot
or two at a time and the pile carpet deadened the sound.

They had deposited him in his chair in the centre of the room
near the big brass bedstead. After ten minutes' painful crawling
he had reached the toilet table which stood in front of the
window with a couple of electric candles on either side of the
mirror. He moved the toilet table to one side, then bumped
steadily across the carpet until he had reached the window. And
then he gave a little gasp of surprise.

He found himself looking straight at the window of his own
bedroom at Mrs. Viljohn-Smythe's. There was no mistaking it. The
electric light was burning and the curtains had not yet been
drawn. He could see the black and pink eiderdown on his bed and
the black lining of the chintz curtains. Then he remembered the
slope of the hill. He must be in the room from which he had seen
Bellward looking out.

The sight of the natty bedroom across the way moved Desmond
strangely. It seemed to bring home to him for the first time the
extraordinary position in which he found himself, a prisoner in a
perfectly respectable suburban house in a perfectly respectable
quarter of London, in imminent danger of a violent death.

He wouldn't give in without a struggle. Safety stared him in the
face, separated only by a hundred yards of grass and shrub and
wall. He instinctively gripped the arms of the chair to raise
himself to get a better view from the window, forgetting he was
bound. The ropes cut his arms cruelly and brought him back to
earth.

He tested again the thongs fastening his right arm. Yes! they
were undoubtedly looser than the others. He pulled and tugged and
writhed and strained. Once in his struggles he crashed into the
toilet table and all but upset one of the electric candles which
slid to the table's very brink and was saved, as by a miracle,
from falling to the floor. He resumed his efforts, but with less
violence. It was in vain. Though the ropes about his right arm
were fairly loose, the wrist was solidly fastened to the chair,
and do what he would, he could not wrest it free. He clawed
desperately with his fingers and thumb, but all in vain.

In the midst of his struggles he was arrested by the sound of
whistling. Somebody in the distance outside was whistling,
clearly and musically, a quaint, jingling sort of jig th