16 The Saint Overboard

'And if I was? How deeply will his death hurt you?'

'I should be hurt in a way you couldn't understand.'

He waited. She had an uncanny spine-chilling feeling that he was not sane—that he was giving rein to the solitary sadistic megalomania that was branded on all his actions, playing with her like a cat and savouring the lustful pleasure of watching her agony. Searching for his eyes under the heavy shadow of his brows, she suddenly found them devouring her with a weird rigidity that struck her cold. She found herself speaking dis­jointedly, breathlessly again, trying to drown the new horror in a babble of words that she would never be able to utter unless she let them pour blindly out.

'I know why he went down. I know why he opened that strong-room for you. He wouldn't have done that to save his life —not his own life. He wouldn't have believed you. He tried to tell me that that was why he was going to do it, but couldn't make me believe it. He knew you meant to kill him as soon as it was done. He wasn't afraid. I saw him. I talked to him. He lied to me. He was splendid. But I knew. You offered him something that he could believe. You made him do it for me!'

'Really, my dear Loretta, this is so dramatic. I must have misunderstood our friend Templar. So he becomes the perfect gentle knight, dying to save a lady's honour——'

'Yes. I told you that you wouldn't understand.'

He gave a short harsh exhalation of breath that could not have been called a laugh.

'You little fool! He never did anything of the kind.'

Then she remembered.

'No. But I told him that I should like to live. He did it to save my life.'

'The perfect knight again!'

'Something that you could never understand. I know now. That's the truth, isn't it? You made that bargain with him. My life against his—and a little work. Didn't you?'

He sighed.

'It would have been such a pity not to give such a classical chivalry its chance,' he said.

The sneer brought the blood to her cheeks. She felt a disgust that was almost petrifying. The mask which he had worn since she had first known him was gone altogether now. The smooth imperturbability of his face was no longer the veneer of impene­trable self-possession—it was the fixed grimace of a demon gloat­ing over its own inhumanity. Now she had seen his eyes. . . .

'He never had any right to bargain for me,' she said, and tried not to let her voice tremble. 'I didn't ask him for any sac­rifice—I wouldn't take any. I'm here, and I can make my own bargain. The Saint's done all you wanted him to. Why not let him go?'

'To come back presently and interfere with me again?'

'You could make it a condition that he said nothing—that he forgot everything he knew. He'd keep his word.'

'Of course—the perfect knight. . . . How ridiculous you are!'

'Did you always think that?'

He stopped short, with his head on one side. Then his cold reptilian hand went up and slowly touched her face.

'You know what I think of you, my dear. I told you, once. You were trying to deceive me. You tried to destroy me with your beauty, but you would have given me nothing. And yet for you I took risks—I placed myself in fantastic danger—I gam­bled everything—to keep you beside me and see how treacherous you could be. But!'—his hand suddenly dropped on her arm in a grasp so brutal that she almost cried out—'I had my own idea about how treacherous I would allow you to be, and how you would make amends for it later.'

He dragged her up against him and ravished her mouth, briefly, cold-bloodedly. She stood unresisting and still as death until he thrust her away.

'Now,' he said, 'you are not in a position to make bargains.'

He stooped over the air-line again. She tore