The Saint Meets His Match (She was a Lady)

'Why not?' she answered, in a tone that matched his own for evenness. 'You can't spend twenty-four hours a day thinking and talking about nothing but that.'

He shifted his gaze to her face. Her beauty was utterly calm and tranquil. She showed nothing—not in the tremor of a lip, or the flicker of an eyelid. And unless something were done there and then, she might have less than two months of life ahead of her before a paid menial of the law hanged her by the neck. . . .

Teal's whistle, in the street below, shrieked again like a lost soul.

And Jill Trelawney laughed. Not hysterically, not even in bravado. She just laughed. Softly.

She turned back the coat of her plain tweed costume, and he saw a little holster on the broad belt she wore.

'But I've never overlooked it,' she said—'not entirely.'

Simon came round the table, and his fingers closed on her wrist in a circle of cool steel.

'Not that way,' he said.

She met his eyes.

'It's the only way for me,' she said. 'I've never had a fancy for the Old Bailey—and the crowds—and the black cap. And the three weeks' waiting, in Holloway, with the chaplain coming in like a funeral every day. And the last breakfast—at such an unearthly hour of the morning!' The glimmer in her eyes was one of pure amusement. 'No one could possibly make a good dying speech at 8 a.m.,' she said.

'You're talking nonsense,' said the Saint roughly.

'I'm not,' she said. 'And you know it. If the worst comes to the worst——'

'It hasn't come to that yet.'

'Not yet.'

'And it won't, lass—not while I'm around.'

She laughed again.

'Simon—really—you're a darling!'

'But have you only just discovered that?' said the Saint.

He made her smile. Even if her laughter had been of neither hysteria nor bravado, it had not been a thing to reassure him. A smile was different. And he still found it easy to make her smile.  

But she was of such a very unusual mettle that he could have no peace of mind with her at such a moment. They were very recent partners, and still she was almost a stranger to him. They were familiar friends of a couple of days' standing; and he hardly knew her. In the days of their old enmity he had recognized in her a fearless inde­pendence that no man could have lightly undertaken to control— unless he had been insanely vain. And with that fearless independence went an unconscious aloofness. She would follow her own counsel, and never realize that any­one else might consider he had a right to know what that counsel was. That aloofness was utterly unaware—he divined that it had never been in her at all before the days of the Angels of Doom, and when, the work of the Angels of Doom was done it would be. gone.

And Teal's whistle was silent. Simon looked down from a window, and saw that Teal had gone. But a uniformed man stood at the foot of the steps on the pavement out­side, and looked up from time to time.

'Well?' said the girl.

'He's gone for his warrant,' said the Saint. 'Cast your bread upon the waters, and you shall find it after many days.