'Well, maybe he thinks that I'll have had enough.'
'And maybe he believes in fairies.'
'I do. I saw a beautiful one in Dinard. He had green lacquered toe-nails.'
'You're not very convincing.'
The Saint raised himself a little from the pillow, and shook the ash from his cigarette. He met her eyes without wavering.
'I'm convinced, anyway,' he said steadily. 'I'm going to do the job.'
She looked at him no less steadily.
'Why are you going to do the job?'
'Because it's certain death if I don't, and by no means certain if I do. Also because I'll go a long way for a new sensation, and this will be the first strong-room I've ever cracked in a diving suit.'
Her hands unclasped from her knees, and she opened her bag to take out a cigarette. He propped himself up on one elbow to light it for her. Then he took her hand and held it. She tilted her golden-chestnut head back against the bulkhead, and a shaft of sunlight through the porthole lay across her face so that she looked like a fallen angel catching the last light from heaven. He had no regrets.
'We have had one or two exciting days,' she said.
'Probably we've had exciting lives.'
'You have.'
'And you. If I can imagine all you haven't told me ... You're not a bit like a detective, Loretta.'
'What should I be?'
He shrugged.
'Tougher?' he said.
'Don't you think I'm tough?'
'Yes. I know you are. But not all through.'
'Ought I to be an ogre?'
'You couldn't. Not with a mouth like yours. And yet . . .'
'I oughtn't to have a heart.'
'Perhaps.'
'I know. I must get rid of it. Do you think there'd be any second-hand market for it?'
'I could introduce you to a second-rate buccaneer who'd make a bid.'
She laughed.
'And yet you're not everything that a second-rate buccaneer ought to be—not as I've known them.'
'Tell me.'
She considered him for a while, with a shadow of wistfulness in her mocking gaze that made him aware of his own hunger, though her parted lips still smiled.
'You're kind,' she said simply, 'and you want so much that you can never have. You have an honour that honest people couldn't understand. You're not fighting against laws: you're fighting against life. You'd tear the world to pieces to find something that's only in your own mind; and when you'd got it you'd find it was just a dream. . . . Besides, you don't talk out of the side of your mouth enough.'
He was silent for a moment.
'I expect I could cultivate that,' he said at length, and sat up so that he could put her hand to his lips. 'Otherwise, we aren't so different. We both wanted something that wasn't there, and we set out to find it—in our own ways.'
'And now we've found plenty.' She glanced out of the porthole, and turned back to him thoughtfully. 'We'll probably both be down somewhere in the sea before the sun comes up again, Saint. . . . It's a funny sort of thought, isn't
