16 The Saint Overboard

little hand and lifted me out of the abyss. Couldn't you take on the job of saving a lost soul? Of course you might always get lost yourself, but that wouldn't matter. We could always console each other.'

'I wonder why Ingerbeck's didn't think of signing you up years ago.'

He smiled.

'They might have tried, but I'm afraid I haven't got any sort of affinity for dotted lines. Besides, I'm not naturally honest. You try to recover stolen property for the insurance companies, don't you?'

'That's part of the job.'

'Well, I do the same thing, but not for any insurance com­pany.'

'Not even on a ten per cent commission?'

'I have worked on that basis, but it was a long time ago. My tastes were a lot more innocent and simple in those days.'

'It's not a bad reward, when there are millions to look for,' she said temptingly.

He sighed.

'It's so dull to be honest. Nobody else but you could make it even bearable. But I know what you mean. I'm on a holiday, and I can always pick up a few millions some other time. It was your picnic originally, and you let me in on it——'

'I needn't have done that.'

There was a cool and rather sad finality in her voice, so much in contrast to the wavering dance of her eyes, that he looked at her keenly for a moment before replying. In that vivid and care­free surround of laughing swimmers and brightly-clad sunbathers he felt a shadow round them, cutting them off in a dynamic isolation of their own from all these thoughtless and ordinary things.

'It was my charm,' he explained at length. 'My father-con­fessor touch. You just couldn't resist me.'

She shook her head. The gold flashed in her hair, and her lips smiled; but the light mockery of her eyes was subdued to an elfin seriousness.

'I mean I needn't have given up hope and gone in for such desperate measures so soon.'

'What's happened?' he asked; and the brown smooth-muscled arm on which he was propped up turned so that his hand closed over hers.

She looked down at him steadily, and the shadow around them failed to touch her enchanting face.

'I had a note this morning,' she said. 'It was delivered at the hotel before I woke up. I've got an invitation to have dinner with Vogel on the Falkenberg.'

 

II.      HOW SIMON TEMPLAR ALSO RECEIVED AN INVITATION,

            AND A PAIR OF PINK SOCKS HOVE UP ON THE HORIZON

A STOUT gentleman ambled by, with a green eyeshade on his brow and a diminutive slip clinging by some miracle of adhesion to the reentrant curve of his abdomen, looking like a debauched Roman emperor on his way to the bath; a Parisian sylph in a startling lace costume that left nothing except her birthday to the imagination arranged her white limbs artistically under a gaudy sunshade and waited for the rush of art students to gather round; two children disputing the ownership of a bucket opened up on a line of personalities that would have left a couple of bootleggers listening in awe; but these were events that might have been happening on another planet.

He remembered the speedboat tied up alongside the Falk­enberg, which had not been there before.

'You hadn't got some crazy idea of accepting, had you?' he said mechanically.

'It's what I've been waiting for.'

'I know, but— What do you think happened last night?'

She took one of his cigarettes.