The Saint Meets His Match (She was a Lady)

such a cheerful carelessness that she had to laugh.

'I wasn't even trying to,' she said mildly. 'I probably shall one day, but that'll keep. Did you see much?'

'Only the exteriors.'

'Then you must have seen the police,' she said. 'But you didn't offer to lend a hand.'

He smiled.

'I was minding my own business,' he said. 'Your way out was easy enough, and I'd never heard you wanted chaperoning on these parties. If I'd thought you were likely to get in a jam, I'd have horned in; but since I saw the policeman waddling along a hundred yards astern with his suspenders bursting under the strain, and you skipping away like a young gazelle, I didn't see anything to get excited about. I've run too many races against the police myself, in my younger days, to get seriously wor­ried about any policeman who's less than three miles in the lead when he starts chasing me. But it does them good to run, Jill—it shakes up their livers and stops their kidneys congealing.'

'Did you mean to do the same thing as I did?'

'Something like. I've been over that room with a small-toothed comb myself more than once, and plenty more of the house likewise; but it was only to-night I got your inspiration about the desk, and I was meaning to try your very own experiment on it.'

'But I thought you said you didn't see anything inside the room?'

'Did I really?'

She looked at him with something like a grimace.

'Are you still being difficult?'

'Oh, no. . . . But let's revert for a moment to the ab­sorbing subject of supralapsarianists. Do you really be­lieve they wear barbed-wire underwear and take off their socks when they pass an infralapsarianist in the street?'

She pouted.

'If you don't mean to talk turkey,' she said, 'you don't have to give me applesauce. I'm not a fish.'

'O.K., baby. But how much of that cache did you get through before Cullis butted in?'

She was lighting a cigarette from the case he handed her, and she shook her head ruefully over the match.

'I didn't get through any of it,' she said. 'It was just a waste of time finding it. The door behind me and the false top in the desk must have opened just about simul­taneously. There was a despatch box, and I think there were one or two odd papers underneath; that's all I saw before the fun started. It was hearing you outside that beat me. If that hadn't made me decide that the tall tim­ber was the best next stop for Little Girl, I'd probably have lifted anything I could see and hoped I'd get some­thing good.'

'It wouldn't have helped you much,' said the Saint. 'There can't be many documents in existence that would incriminate Cullis, and it would have been a thousand to one against your collecting the right ones in your -handful.'

'And now,' said the girl bitterly, 'if there ever were any incriminating papers in that cache, he'll have them out and burn them before he goes to bed tonight. He won't take a second chance with me.'

Simon shrugged.

'Why should he ever have taken a chance at all?'

'It's the way of a man like that,' said Jill. 'He may have wanted to gloat over them in private. Or he may have just kept them for