one in the
morning
The first person to discover the fire had happened to be Tom Clark , who had been returning late from the village to his shack on the hill , and had seen an unnatural glow through the long French windows of the drawing-room . By the time he had roused the house servants in their remote quarters and set off for the garage to summon help , the drawing-room and the adjoining hall were a mass of flame . When he returned with the new hose-cart and helpers the servants had already opened the large front door , admitting the wind , which blew the fire through the stairway like a bellows and completed the destruction of the house . Clark knew as well as Ferguson , the superintendent , and a half-dozen others , that when Archie emerged from his rooms on the ground floor , he was not fully undressed : though it was past one in the morning , he had not yet gone to bed . And although no one said anything , habitually cautious as such people usually are when indiscretion may involve them with their masters , they had easily made the correct deductions about the cause of the fire ... . When Archie came from the orangery , he saw Clark standing on the terrace beside the ruins , examining the scene of his already famous exploit of the night before . He may well have been wondering how he had ever succeeded in keeping his balance and in crawling like a fly over the surface of the wall he had helped to put up .