16 The Saint Overboard

slowly. With a sudden burst of vicious energy he grabbed for his hat and thumped it on his head.

'If you put it that way, I can't argue,' he growled. 'But you're going to wish I had!' He transferred his glare from her unconscious back to the Saint's face. 'As for you—if anything happens to Loretta through my not being here——'

'We'll be sure to let you know about it,' said the Saint, and opened the door for him.

Murdoch stumped through with his fists clenched;  and the Saint half closed it as Loretta turned from the window and came across the room. He took her hands.

'I shall be gone while you're seeing Steve off,' he said. 'I can't risk the foyer again, but I spotted a fire escape.'

'Must you?' The faint irony of her voice was baffled by the enigma of her smiling mouth.

He nodded.

'Not because I want to. But they ought to see me going back to the Corsair before there's too much excitement about my shadow having lost me. You're still sure you mean to go to?night?'

'Quite sure.'

'Did I dream the rest of it, after you'd gone last night?'

'I don't know, dear. What did you have for dinner?'

'Lobster mayonnaise. I dreamt that you came back from the Falkenberg. Safe. And always beautiful. To me.'

'And then the danger really started.'

'I dreamt that you didn't think it was too dangerous.'

Her eyes searched his face, with the laughter stilled in them for a moment. The tip of the dragon's tongue stirred on her shoulder as she drew breath. One hand released itself to trace the half-mocking line of his mouth.

'But I am afraid,' she said.

Suddenly he felt her lips crushed and melting against his, and her body pressed against him, for one soundless instant; and then, before he could move, she had brushed past him and gone.

Orace was waiting for him anxiously when he got back.

'Yer bin a long time,' Orace remarked shatteringly.

'Thousands of years,' said the Saint.

He sat out on deck again after he had taken his last daylight swim, and sipped a glass of sherry, and dined on one of Orace's superlative meals. The speed tender had set out again from the Falkenberg and returned about half-past seven with Vogel, in evening dress, sitting beside Loretta. Through the binoculars, from one of the saloon portholes, he had seen Vogel smiling and talking, his great nose profiled against the water.

He sat out, with a cigarette clipped and half-forgotten between his lips and his eyes creased against the smoke, as motionless as a bronze Indian, while the water turned to dark glass and then to burnished steel. There was no fog that night. The river ran blue-black under the wooded rocks of the Vicomte and the ramparts and granite headland of St Malo. Lights sprang up, multiplying, on the island, and were mirrored in St Servan and Dinard, and spread luminous rapiers across the river. The hulls of the craft anchored in the Ranee sank back into the gloom until the night swallowed them, and only their winking lights remained on the water. The lighthouses of the inlet were awake, green and red flashes stabbing irregularly across the bay and twinkling down from Grand Larron. A drift of music from one of the Casinos lingered across the estuary; and the anchorage where the Falk­enberg should be was a constellation of lights.

Loretta was there; but Simon saw no need for her to be alone.

The idea grew with him as the dark deepened and his imagina­tion worked through it. In his own way he was afraid, impatient with his enforced helplessness. . . . Presently he sent another cigarette spinning like a glow-worm through the blackness, and went below to take off his clothes. He tested the working of his automatic, brought a greased cartridge into the breech, secured the safety-catch, and