Knight Templar, or The Avenging Saint

'Are you ready, Mr. Vassiloff?'

The captain spoke suavely from the doorway, and Vassiloff rose unsteadily to his feet.

'Yess,' he said thickly. 'I am ready.'

Then he leered down again at the girl.

'I go to prepare myself,' he said. 'It is perhaps better that we should be married first. Then we shall not be disturbed....'

3

THE DOOR closed behind him.

Without a flicker of expression, the captain crossed the cabin and sat down at his desk. He drew towards him a large book like a ledger, found a place in it, and left it open in front of him; then, from the box in his drawer, he selected another of his thin cigars, lighted it, and leaned back at his ease. He scarcely spared the girl a glance.

Sonia Delmar waited without speaking. She remembered, then, how often she had seen such situations enacted on the stage and on the screen, how often she had read of them! ...

She found herself trembling; but the physical reaction had no counterpart in her mind. She could not help recalling all the stereotyped jargon that had been splurged upon the subject by a hun­dred energetic parrots. 'A fate too horrible to contemplate'—'a thing worse than death.' . . . All the heroines she had encountered faced the horror as if they had never heard of it before. She felt that she ought to have experienced the same emotions as they did; but she could not. She could only think of the game that had been thrown away—the splendid gamble that had failed.

At the desk, the captain uncrossed his legs and inhaled again from his cigar.

It seemed to Sonia Delmar that that little cabin was the centre of the world—and the world did not know it. It was hard to believe that in other rooms, all over the world, men and women were gathered together in careless comradeship, talking perhaps, reading perhaps, confident of a thousand to­morrows as tranquil as their yesterdays. She had felt the same when she had read that a criminal was to be executed the next day—that same shat­tering realization that the world was going on unmoved, while one lonely individual waited for dawn and the grim end of the world.. ..

And yet she sat upright and still, staring ahead with unfaltering eyes, buoyed with a bleak and bitter courage that was above reason. In that hour she found within herself a strength that she had not dreamed of, something in her breed that for­bade any sign of fear—that would face death, or worse than death, with scornful lips.

And the door opened and Vassiloff came in.

Anything that he had done to 'prepare' himself was not readily visible. He still wore his hat, and his fur collar was muffled even closer about his chin; only his step seemed to have become more alert.

He gave the girl one cold-blooded glance; and then he turned to the captain.

'Let us waste no more time,' he said harshly.

The captain stood up.

'I have the witnesses waiting, Mr. Vassiloff. Permit me....'

He went to the door and called two names curtly. There was a murmured answer; and the owners of the names came in—two men in coarse trousers and blue seamen's jerseys, who stood gazing uncomfortably about the cabin while the captain wrote rapidly in the book in front of him. Then he addressed them in a language that the girl could not understand; and, hesitantly, one of the men came forward and took the pen. The other followed suit. Then the captain turned to Vassiloff.

'If you will sign —'

As the Russian scrawled his name the captain spoke a brusque word of dismissal, and the wit­nesses filed out.

'Your wife should also sign,' added the captain, turning back to the desk. 'Perhaps you will arrange that?''

'I will.' Vassiloff put down the pen. 'I want to be left alone now—for a little while—with my wife. But I shall require to see you again. Where shall I find you?'

'I shall finish my cigar on the bridge.'

'Good. I will call you.'

Vassiloff waved his hand in a conclusive gesture; and, with a slightly sardonic bow, the captain accepted his discharge.

The door closed, but Vassiloff did not turn round. He still stood by the desk, with his back to the girl. She heard the snap of a cigarette case, the sizzle of a match; and a cloud of blue smoke wreathed up towards the ceiling. He was playing with her—cat and mouse....

'So,' he said softly, 'we are married—Sonia.'

The girl drew a deep breath. She was shivering, in spite of the warmth of the evening; and she did not want to shiver. She did not want to add that relish to his gloating triumph—to see the sneer of sadistic satisfaction that would flame across his face. She wanted to be what he had called her— ice. ... To save her soul aloof and undefiled, in­finitely aloof and terribly cold....

She said swiftly, breathlessly: 'Yes—we're married—if that means anything to you.... But it means nothing to me. Whatever you do to me, you'll never be able to call me yours—never.'

He had unbuttoned his coat and flung it back; it billowed away from his wide shoulders, making him loom gigantically under the light.

'Perhaps,' he said, 'you think you love some­one else.'

'I'm sure of it,' she said in a low voice.

'Ah! Is it, after all, that you were not being sold to Sir Isaac Lessing for the help he could give your father?'

'Lessing means nothing to me.'

'So there is another?'

'Does that matter?'

Another cloud of smoke went up towards the ceiling, 'His name?'

She did not answer.

'Is it Roger Conway?' he asked; and anew fear chilled her heart.

'What do you know about him?' she whis­pered.

'Nearly everything, old dear,' drawled the Saint; and he turned around, without beard, without glasses, smiling at her across the cabin, a mirthful miracle with the inevitable cigarette slanted rakishly between laughing lips.

CHAPTER EIGHT How Simon Templar borrowed a gun— and thought kindly of lobsters

1

'SAINT!'

Sonia Delmar spoke the name incredulously, storming the silence and the dream with that swift husky breath. And the silence was broken; but the dream did not break. ...

'Well—how's life, honey?' murmured the dream; but no dream could have miraged that gay, inspiring voice, or the fantastic flourish that went with it.

'Oh, Saint!'

He laughed softly, a sudden lilt of a laugh; and in three strides he was across the cabin, his hands on her shoulders.

'Weren't you expecting me, Sonia?'

'But I saw them shoot you—'

'Me? I'm bullet-proof, lass, and you ought to have known it. Besides, I wasn't the man in the comic canoe. That was an Italian exhibit—a senti­mental skeezicks with tender memories of the girl he left behind him in Sorrento. And I'm afraid his donna is completely mobile now.'

She, too, was half laughing, trembling un­ashamedly now that the tense cord of suspense was snapped.