The Saint Meets His Match (She was a Lady)

awful careful we don't bounce Number Three on the programme before he's sung his song.'

'We shall.'

'And then,' said the Saint dreamily, 'you'll have your hands full looking after that boy friend back in Gee, Wis., won't you?'

There was a silence.

Then she said: 'And you?'

'Oh,' said the Saint, 'you won't want me there, will you?'

She laughed.

'Won't you be going back to someone?'

'Who knows!'

The Saint's cigarette end reddened to a long inhala­tion, and faded.

'You butted in where you shouldn't have butted in,' he said. 'This story started mostly as a joke, as I told you one time. I always have been crazy. But I certainly didn't mean to get landed into all this. Since I'm here, I'm enjoying myself; but the entertainment was not among those listed for this season. However, here we are, and here is nobody else, and I always believe in making the best of a good job. Possibly you noticed the tendency at breakfast yesterday.'

'Oh!' said the girl.

'There is,' said the Saint firmly, 'a piffling idea abroad among the sub-hominoids of Suburbia that a man may not kiss a girl for no other reason than that he simply wants to kiss her. Now that is obviously absurd, because although you've just saved my life I'm going to kiss you very passionately for no other reason than that I want to—and you are going to like it.' 

 

2

 

Inspector Teal arrived at Essenden Towers later, be­fore the servants returned from their ball, and found four blasphemous men in the library. His great regret ever afterwards was that, in spite of the extraordinary circumstance of their discovery and their known reputa­tions, he could never find a substantial charge to bring against them in connection with that night's mystery. It was even more suspicious because the stories they told were perfectly true, and they could not be made to con­tradict either themselves or one another under the most searching examination. Besides which, there were many scraps of circumstantial evidence to bear them out. And it is not a crime for four gangsters, however notorious, to be the guests of a peer.

This annoyed Teal, because he was unable to find any trace of the principal actors in the mystery. And even a minor scapegoat would have been better than none.

He went down through the wine cellar and found the flooded cave. When the waters had subsided, an extensive search was made with electric torches, but still the extent of the cavern and the source of its strange subterranean tides could not be discovered. And no human eyes ever saw Lord Essenden again.

It was late the following afternoon when a sleepless, but not more than ordinarily sleepy, Chief Inspector Teal returned to Scotland Yard to prepare his report .

'I don't suppose Essenden will ever be seen again,' he told the assistant commissioner gloomily.

'He was murdered, of course?'

'Probably he was. But how are we ever going to prove that if we can't produce a body? You know the law as well as I do.'

Cullis rasped his chin.

'Waldstein first,