The Saint Meets His Match (She was a Lady)

the most cavalierly insolent voice any of them had ever heard.

It sent Pinky Budd a dull pink, and Stephen Weald a clammy grey-white.

Jill Trelawney's cheeks went hot with a rising flush of anger. Perhaps because of her greater sensitiveness, she appreciated the mocking arrogance of that voice more than either of the others. It carried every conceivable strength and concentration of insolence and impudence and biting challenge.

'Well?'

That gentle drawl again. It was amazing what that voice could do with one simple syllable. It jagged and rawed it with the touch of a high-speed saw, and drawled it out over a bed of hot Saharan sand in a hint of impish laughter.

'Templar!'

Budd dropped the name huskily, and Weald inhaled sibilantly through his teeth. The girl's lip curled.

'You were talking about me,' drawled the man in the window.

It was a flat statement. He made it to the girl, ignoring the two men after one sweeping stare. For a fleeting sec­ond her voice failed her, and she was furious with herself. Then—

'Mr. Templar, I presume?' she said calmly.

The Saint bowed as profoundly as his position in the window admitted.

'Correct.' A flickering little smile cut across his mouth. 'Jill Trelawney?'

'Miss Trelawney.'

'Miss Trelawney, of course. For the present. You'll be plain Trelawney to the judge, and in jail you'll just have a number.'

It was extraordinary how a spark of hatred could be kindled and fanned to a flame in such an infinitesimal space of time. An instant before he had appeared in that window he had been nothing to her but a name—until then.

And now she was looking at the man through a blaze of anger that had leapt up to white heat within her in a moment. Before that, she had been frankly bored with the fears of Weald and Budd. She had dismissed them, callously. 'If it'll make you feel any happier to have him fixed——'  It had been completely impersonal. But now . . .

She knew what hate was. There were three men she hated, with everything she did and every breath she took. She would not have believed that there was room in her soul for more hatreds than that, and yet this new hatred seemed momentarily to overshadow all the others.

She was looking fixedly at him, unaware of anything or anyone else, engraving every feature of his appearance on her memory in lines of fire. He must have been tall above the average, she judged from the way he had to stoop to get his head in at the window; and his shoulders fitted uneasily in the aperture, wide as it was. A tall, lean buccaneer of a man, dark of hair and eyebrow, bronzed of skin, with a face incredibly clean-cut and deep-set blue eyes. The way those eyes looked at her was an insult in itself.

'I believe you were proposing to fix me,' said the Saint. 'Why not? I'm here, if you want me.'

He broke the silence without an effort—indeed, you might have said he did not know that there had been a silence.

'If you want a fight,' said Budd redly, 'I'm here. See?'

'Wait a minute!'

The girl stopped Budd with a hand on his arm as he was fumbling with the door.

'Mr. Templar has his posse within call,' she said cynically. 'Why