16 The Saint Overboard

was a full moon;— but the banks of sea-mist which had rolled up towards midnight, in one of those freakish fits of temperament that sometimes strike the north coast of France in early summer, had blanketed its light down to a mere ghostly glimmer that did no more than lend a tinge of grey luminance to the cloudy dark. Over on the other side of the estuary St. Malo was lost without trace: even the riding lights of the yacht nearest to his own struggled to achieve more than a phosphorescent blur in the baffling obscu­rity. His own lights shed a thin diffused aurora over the sleek sea-worthy lines of the Corsair, and reached no further beyond than he could have spun a match. He could see nothing that would give him his explanation; but he could listen, and his ears shared in that uncanny keenness of all his senses.

He stood motionless, nostrils slightly dilated almost as if he would have brought scent to his aid against the fog and sniffed information out of the dank saltiness of the dark. He heard the whisper of ripples against the hull and the faint chatter of the anchor-chain dipping a link or two as the Corsair worked with the tide. He heard the sibilant creak of a rope as the dinghy strained against the side of a craft moored two berths away, and the clanking rumble of a train rolling over the steel ways some­where behind the dull strip of almost imperceptible luminousness that was Dinard. The mournful hooting of a ship groping to­wards harbour, way out over the Channel towards Cherbourg, hardly more than a quiver of vibration in the clammy stillness, told him its own clear story. The murmur of indistinguishable voices somewhere across the water where the shout had come from he heard also, and could build up his own picture from the plunk of shoe-heels against timber and the grate of an oar slip­ping into its rowlock. All these things delineated themselves on his mind like shadings of background detail on a photographic plate, but none of them had the exact pitch of what he was lis­tening for.

He heard it, presently—an ethereal swish of water, a tiny pit­ter of stray drops from an incautiously lifted head tinkling back into the oily tide, a rustle of swift movement in the grey gloom that was scarcely audible above the hiss and lap of the sea under his own keel. But he heard it, and knew that it was the sound he had been waiting for.

He listened, turning his head slightly, ears pricked for a more precise definition of the sound. Over in the fog where the voices had been muttering he heard the whirr of a lanyard whipped from its coiling, and the sudden splutter and drone of an out­board motor taking life jarred into the fine tuning of his atten­tion. Then he cut it out again, as one tunes out an interfering station on a sensitive radio receiver, and touched on that silent dragging cleave of the water once more, that sluicing ripple of an expert swimmer striving to pass through the water quickly but without noise. Nearer, too. Coming directly towards him.

Still Simon Templar did not move, but his immobility had an electric tension about it, like that of a leopard about to spring. Whatever might be happening out in that steamy darkness was not strictly any concern of his, except in the role of public-spir­ited citizen—which he was not. But it was for just that blithe willingness to meddle in affairs which did not concern him that he had come by the Corsair herself and all his other outward tokens of unlimited wealth, and which made certain persons think it so epically absurd that he should go about with the nick­name of the Saint. Only for that sublimely lawless curiosity, a variegated assortment of people whose habitats ranged from the gutters of Paris to the high spots of Broadway, from the beaches of the South Pacific to the most sanctified offices of Scotland Yard, could see no just reason why he should be taking a million­aire's holiday at Dinard instead of sewing mail-bags in Larkstone Prison or resting in a nice quiet cemetery with a stomach­ful of lead to digest. But the roots of that outlaw vigilance were too deep for cure, even if he had wished to cure them; and out there in the vaporous twilight something odd was happening of which he had to know more. Wherefore he listened, and heard the outboard chuffing around in the murk, and the swimmer com­ing closer.

And then he saw her. A shift of the air moved the mist-cur­tains capriciously at the very limit of his vision, and he saw her suddenly in the down-seeping nimbus of his riding lights.

Her.

It was that realisation of sex, guessed rather than positively asserted by the dimly-seen contour of her features and the glis­tening curve of a green bathing cap, which sent a skin-deep tin­gle of intuition plunging into profound and utter certainty. If it had been a man, he would not have lost interest; but he could have produced half a dozen commonplace theories to assimilate that final fact, with a regretful premonition that the adventure would not be likely to run for long. But a girl swimming stealth­ily through a fogbound sea at three o'clock in the morning could not be associated with yells and shooting in the dark by any prosaic theory; and his pulses, which up to that moment had been ticking over as steadily as clockwork, throbbed a shade faster at the knowledge. Somewhere out there in the leaden haze big medicine was seething up, and inevitably it was ordained that he must dip his spoon in the brew.

He was standing so motionless, half cloaked by the deep shadow of the deckhouse, that she had taken three more long strokes towards the ketch before she saw him. She stopped swim­ming abruptly, and stared up—he could almost read the wild thought tearing through her mind that she