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Bond said severely, "Now, listen, Honey You look wonderful, but that isn't the way to wear a kiht and stop trying to look like a call girl It just isn't good manners at breakfast"

"Oh, you are a stuffy old beast" She pulled her ki? I want to play at being married"

"Not at breakfast time," said Bond firmly "Come on -and eat up It's delicious And anyway, I'ot up and walked round the table and kissed the top of her head "And as for playing, as you call it, I'd rather play with you than anyone in the world But not now" Without waiting for her answer he walked into the bathroom and shut the door

Bond shaved and had a bath and a shower He felt desperately sleepy Sleep came to him in waves so that fro and bend his head down between his knees When he canized the signs He had been drugged In the coffee or in the pineapple juice? It didn'tmattered All he wanted to do was lie down on the tiled floor and shut his eyes Bond weaved drunkenly to the door He forgot that he was naked That didn't irl had finished her breakfast She was in bed He staggered over to her, holding on to the furniture The ki in a pile on the floor She was fast asleep, naked under a single sheet

Bond gazed dreamily at the empty pillow beside her head No! He found the switches and turned out the lights Now he had to crawl across the floor and into his rooot to his bed and pulled himself on to it He reached out an arht He missed it The lamp crashed to the floor and the bulb burst With a last effort Bond turned on his side and let the waves sweep over his head

The luures on the electric clock in the double room said nine-thirty

At ten o'clock the door of the double rooainst the lighted corridor It was a man He must have been six feet six tall He stood on the threshold with his ar Satisfied, he moved slowly into the room and up to the bed He knew the way exactly He bent down and listened to the quiet breathing of the girl After a moment he reached up to his chest and pressed a switch A flashlight with a very broad diffused beaht was attached to him by a belt that held it above the breast bone He bent forward so that the soft light shone on the girl's face

The intruder exairl's face for several minutes One of his hands came up and took the sheet at her chin and softly drew the 'sheet down to the end of the bed The hand that dren the sheet was not a hand It was a pair of articulated steel pincers at the end of a metal stalk that disappeared into a black silk sleeve It was ati his chest to and fro so that every corner of the body caain and delicately lifted a corner of the sheet froirl Theface, then he switched off the torch on his chest and h which Bond was sleeping

The er beside Bond's bed He scrutinized every line, every shadow on the dark, rather cruel face that lay drowned, almost extinct, on the pillow He watched the pulse in the neck and counted it and, when he had pulled down the sheet, he did the saed the curve of the htfully at the hidden strength in the flat stoht hand and examined its life and fate lines

Finally, with infinite care, the steel cla the sheet back up to Bond's neck For anotherman, then it swished softly away and out into the corridor and the door closed with a click

XIV

COME INTO MY PARLOUR

The electric clock in the cool dark room in the heart of the mountain showed four-thirty

Outside the h another day At the eastern end of the island, the mass of birds, Louisiana herons, pelicans, avocets, sandpipers, egrets, fla, their nests or fished in the shalloaters of the lake Most of the birds had been disturbed so often that year that they had given up any idea of building In the past few ular intervals by theplaces and the beginnings of their nests This year rate and many would die of the nervous hysteria that seizes bird colonies when they no longer have peace and privacy