he would remember all his life, with her fair head fearlessly tilted and the grace of a princess in her unfaltering stride. And then she also was gone, and the dark doorway sprang into empty brilliance after her.
'I think Marcovitch will have to die,' said the Saint
The wire broke in the twisting of his fingers like a piece of rotten thread, and he dropped it without noticing that it had broken.
He stared expressionlessly up and down the road. The scattering of people near by were resuming their affairs as if nothing had happened; but at either end of the street he could see more of them, drifting in desultory mosaics under lampposts and lighted windows. Monty had been right—bitterly right. They could never have got away. There wasn't a vehicle of any kind in sight—nothing that they could have commandeered for such an escape as they would have had to make. The first shot would have hemmed them in with a human wall.
Simon felt as if an arctic wind had blown through him, turning his stomach to ice. He sat with his fists clenched in a spasm that ached up his arms, with his eyes fixed on nothing, tasting the dregs of humiliation.
And then he saw a new shaft of luminance swimming round into the street. It fanned out along the line of houses, lifting them in turn into a garish oval of illumination and dropping them back into the dark. For a moment the Saint was caught squarely in the beam, but he had bent his head instinctively and commenced to play with the wires. Then the beam went past him, settling into a long, low stream of light that swept straight down the road and turned the cobblestones into gleaming mountains with black pits behind them. The car sped down the opposite side of the road with the soft hiss of a perfectly balanced engine, and braked to an effortless stop outside the police station.
Then a wave of gloom rolled back on it as the headlights were switched off; and the Saint looked at it over his shoulder in a throb of incredulous expectation. The chauffeur was running round to open the door, and as the passenger stood up Simon saw his profile clean-cut against the light in the station doorway. It was the Crown Prince Rudolf.
XI. HOW MONTY HAYWARD RECITED POETRY,
AND SIMON TEMPLAR TREATED HIMSELF TO
A WASH
THE Crown Prince dusted his sleeve and walked up the steps of the police station, exquisite and inscrutable as ever. He disappeared into the gaunt building. Simon watched him go.
And then something seemed to crack in the Saint's brain. Something had to give way under the tearing impact of the desperation that had engulfed him, and the thing that gave way was the desperation itself. A great weight lilted off his shoulders, and his lungs opened to a mighty breath of life. The heaving earth steadied itself under him. He felt like a strong swimmer who has been trapped in a clinging entanglement of weed, who has fought back out of the choking darkness into a blaze of sunlight and blessed air. The horrible constriction of helplessness broke away from his head, and he felt the wheels of his mind spinning sweet and true again, unhindered even by the disorder which had been throwing them out of gear before the bomb burst. He could have given no reason for that strange reawakening: he only knew that the old fighting courage had come back, sending the blood racing warm along his veins and filling his muscles with the old unconquerable sense of power. He stretched himself like a cat in the exultant gathering of that flame of indomitable strength. And already he knew how the story was going to end.
Monty Hayward looked at him, and was amazed. The bleakness was still in the Saint's eyes, but suddenly there was a twinkle with it as if the sun had glinted over two chips of blue ice. There was the phantom of a smile on the Saint's lips—a smile that had still to reach the careless glory of pure Saintliness, but yet a smile that had not been there before. And the Saint spoke in a voice that shared his smile.
'Could anything be better?'
Monty shied away from that voice as if a thunderbolt had hit the ground in front of him. He could hardly believe that it came from the man whom he had seen reaching for his gun a few seconds earlier. It was lilting—positively lilting. 'I don't see what you mean, old chap,' he said awkwardly. 'Don't you see what's happened?' The lilt in the Saint's voice was stronger—and the Saint was still smiling at him. 'Marcovitch was waiting for Rudolf in Treuchtlingen! He saw Pat somewhere, we don't. know where, and put the cop onto her. Then when he came along here with her he had to leave a message at the rendezvous to say where he'd gone. Rudolf must have arrived a couple of
