Allan the next day, "and it seemed like years while the flat was drifting down to the bridge and the water rising in it every moment.

The flat drifted under the bridge and then promptly sank in midstream.

"We were playing Elaine" explained Anne frigidly, without even looking at her rescuer, "and I had to drift down to Camelot in the barge--I mean the flat. The flat began to leak and I climbed out on the pile.

The inhabitants of Camelia Road tramped to and fro outside the window, just on a level with their heads, and the family in the flat on the ground-floor began to sing, "Hark, my soul, it is the Lord."

A block of flats, constructed with extreme cheapness, towered on either hand.

Flambeau's semi-official flat was on the ground floor, and presented in every way a marked contrast to the American machinery and cold hotel-like luxury of the flat of the Silent Service.

With a French combination of reason and violence Flambeau simply said "Murder!" and, plunging into the flat, had explored, every corner and cupboard of it in five minutes.

Frome had been driving me over to the Flats for about a week when one morning I looked out of my window into a thick snow-fall.

"The railroad's blocked by a freight-train that got stuck in a drift below the Flats," he explained, as we jogged off into the stinging whiteness.

His greatest risk, according to Raffles, lay nearest home: bedridden invalid that he was supposed to be, his nightly terror was of running into Theobald's arms in the immediate neighborhood of the flat. But Raffles had characteristic methods of minimizing even that danger, of which something anon; meanwhile he recounted more than one of his nocturnal adventures, all, however, of a singularly innocent type; and one thing I noticed while he talked.

It was half-past ten when we left the flat, in an interval of silence on the noisy stairs.

He stood a while longer, gazing out over the lonely flat and visioning with constructive imagination the scene if the stampede did come.

He laughed and shook the vision from his eyes, descended to the level, and crossed the flat to camp.

The man with the flat voice was opening a new branch of the subject.

He impounded the dispersing Butteridge plans with one comprehensive sweep of his arm, rescuing them even from the expository finger-marks of the man with the flat voice, and handed them to Bert.