16 The Saint Overboard

it? I've always thought it must be so exasperating to die. You must always leave so much unfinished.'

'You're not afraid.'

'Neither are you.'

'I've so much less to be afraid of.'

She closed her eyes for a second.

'Oh, dishonour! I think I should hate that, with death after it.'

'But suppose it had been a choice,' he said conversationally. 'You know the old story-book formula. The heroine always votes for death. Do you think she really would?'

'I think I should like to live,' she said slowly. 'There are other things to live for, aren't there? You can keep your own honour. You can rebuild your pride. Life can go on for a long while. You don't burn your house down because a little mud has been trodden into the floor.'

Simon looked over his shoulder. The sea had turned paler in the glassy calm of the late afternoon, and the sky was without a cloud, a vast bowl of blue-tinted space stretching through leagues of unfathomable clearness beyond the sharp edge of the horizon.

'Meanwhile,' he said flippantly, 'we might get a bit more morbid if I told you some more about the horrible dilemma of Elphinphlopham.'

She shook her head.

'No.'

'You're right,' he said soberly. 'There are more important things to tell you.'

'Such as?'

'Why I should fall in love with you so quickly.'

'Weren't you just taking advantage of the garden?' she said, with her grey eyes on his face.

'It may have been that. Or maybe it was the garden taking advantage of me. Or maybe it was you taking advantage of both. But it happened.'

'How often has it happened before?'

He looked at her straightly.

'Many times.'

'And how often could it happen again?'

His lips curved with the fraction of a sardonic grin. Vogel had never promised him life—had never even troubled to help him delude himself that his own life would be included in the bargain. Whether he opened the strong-room of the Chalfont Castle or not, Vogel had given his sentence.

Simon Templar had had the best of outlawry. He had loved and romanced, dreamed and philandered and had his fling, and loved again; and he had come to believe that love shared the impermanence of all adventures. Of all the magnificent mad­nesses of youth he had lost only one—the power to tell himself, and to believe, that the world could be summed up and completed in one love. Yet, for the first time in his life, he could tell the lie and believe that it could be true.

'I don't think it'll happen again,' he said.

But she was laughing quietly, with an infinite tenderness in her eyes.

'Unless a miracle happens,' she said. 'And who's going to provide one?'

'Steve Murdoch?' he suggested, and glanced round the bare white cabin. 'This is the dungeon I fished him out of. He really ought to return the compliment.'

'He'll be in St Peter Port by now. ... But this boat is the only address he's got for me, and he won't know where we've gone. And I suppose Vogel won't be going back that way.'

'Two friends of mine back there have some idea where we've gone. Peter Quentin and Roger Conway. They're staying at the Royal. But I forgot to bring my carrier pigeons.'