16 The Saint Overboard

en­joying the devotion of three muscle-conscious young men, the debauched Roman emperor, and a hungry-looking tourist from Egg Harbor, New Jersey, who should have been old enough to know better.

Simon turned away from the repulsive spectacle, and was re­warded by the almost equally unwelcome vision of Orace's mous­tache, through which something more than the sea air was filtering.

'You do break out at the most unromantic moments, Orace,' he complained; and then he saw that Orace's eyes were still fixed glassily on the middle distance.

'Is that the lidy, sir?'

Orace's martial voice was hushed with a sort of awe; and the Saint frowned.

'She isn't a lady,' he said firmly. 'No lady would use such shameless eyes to try and seduce a self-respecting buccaneer from his duty. No lady would take such a mean advantage of a human being.' He perceived that his audience was still scarcely following him, and looked round. 'Nor is that the wench I'm talking about, anyway. Come on away—you'll be getting off in a minute.'

They walked over the sand towards the bend by the swimming pool, where the Promenade des Allies curves out towards the sea.

'If you arsk me,' Orace remarked, recalling the grievance which had been temporarily smoothed over by his anatomical studies, 'these Frogs are all barmy. First thing I arsks for petrol, an' they give me paraffin. Then when I says that ain't what I want, they tell me they've got some stuff called essence, wot's just as good. I 'as a smell of this stuff, an' blimey if it ain't pet­rol. 'Ow the thunderinell can they 'elp goin' barmy wiv a lang­widge like that?'

'I don't suppose they can help it,' said the Saint gravely. 'Did you buy some of this essence?'

'Yessir. Then I tried to get some ice. They 'adn't got no ice, but they tried to sell me some glass. I gave it up an' brought the dinghy rahnd in case yer didn't wanter swim back. Barmy?' said Orace sizzlingly.

It was nearly one o'clock when the fuel tanks had been re­plenished from the cans which Orace had acquired at the cost of so much righteous indignation, and the Saint had cleaned him­self up and put a comb through his hair. Orace produced a drink —freshened, in spite of gloomy prophecies, with ice—and re­quired to know whether he should get lunch.

'I don't know,' said the Saint, with unusual brusqueness.

He had no idea what he wanted to do. He felt suddenly rest­less and dissatisfied. The day had gone flat in prospect. They might have lazed through the long afternoon, steeping themselves in sunlight and romping through the light play of words. They might have plunged together through the cool rapture of the sea, or drifted out under spread sails to explore the Ile de Cezembre and picnic under the cliffs of St Lunaire. They might have en­joyed any of a dozen trivial things which he had half planned in his imagination, secure in a communion of pagan understanding that made no demands and asked no promises. Instead of . which . . .

Because gold rippled in a girl's hair, and an imp of sophisti­cated humour lurked Pan-like in the shadows of her eyes; be­cause the same gaze could sometimes hold a serenity of purpose beyond measure—Simon Templar, at thirty-four, with odysseys of adventure behind him that would have made Ulysses look like a small boy playing in a back yard, found himself in the beginning of that halcyon afternoon at a loose end.

It wasn't exactly the amount of money involved. Four million, if that was a minimum estimate of the total submerged wealth which Vogel had plundered from the sea bottoms, was certainly a lot of pounds. So was ten per cent of it. Or even half that. The Saint wasn't greedy; and he had come out of each of his past sorties into the hazardous hinterlands of adventure with a lengthening line of figures in his bank account which raised their own monument to his flair for boodle. He had no need to be avaricious. There were limits—lofty, vertiginous limits, but limits nevertheless—to how much money one could spend; and he had a sublime faith that the same extravagant providence which had held him up all his life so far would keep him near enough to those limits to save him from feeling depressed. It wasn't exactly that. It was a matter of principle.

'You're getting old,' he reproached himself solemnly. 'At this very moment, you're trying to persuade yourself to work for an insurance company. Just because she has a body like an old man's dream, and you kissed her. An insurance company!'

He shuddered.

And then he turned his eyes to study a speck of movement on the borders of his field of vision. The speed tender was moving away from the side of the Falkenberg,