16 The Saint Overboard

at his hand, and he stood up.

'If you are going to be a nuisance,' he said in his supercilious expiring voice, 'I shall have you taken away.'

'You can't do it!' she panted. 'You haven't everything you want yet. If you kill him, you could never have it.'

'I have you.'

'Only as a prisoner. You can do what you like with me, I suppose. What you want, you can take by force. If that's all you want——'

'It will be enough.'

'But I could give . . .'

'What?'

He was staring at her, seized with a new stillness. There was a thread of moisture on his thin lips, and the high glaze on his cheekbones shone with a dull white lustre. His eyes squinted slightly, smouldering like dark coals. His soft clammy hands gripped her shoulders.

'What?' he repeated.

She could not look at him, or her courage would not be enough. Already she felt denied, shuddering at the dank chill of his touch. She closed her eyes.

'If you let him go I will stay with you willingly—I will be to you anything that you like.'

4

Altogether they took over forty minutes to come up—nearly as long as they had spent on the bottom. It was a wearisome business going through the gradual decompression, hanging suspended in the green void through the lengthening pauses, rising a little further and halting for another interregnum of blank inac­tivity. The Saint felt no ill effects from his long submersion other than a growing fatigue, which had become almost over­powering in the last ten minutes when they had been breaking through the glass dome above the stairway. He had never real­ised that the resistance of the water which had to be overcome with every smallest movement could eat up so much strength; fit and strong as he was, he had a dull ache in every limb and a nervous hunger for unhampered movement in all his muscles which made the exasperatingly slow ascent harder to endure than anything that had preceded it. He would have given half the millions which he had uncovered down there for a cigarette, but even that solace was unattainable.

He realised at the same time that he was lucky to be able to experience discomfort. When he stood back from the open door of the strong-room and announced the completion of his work into the microphone beside his mouth, he had waited for the quick blotting out of all sensation. He did not know exactly how it would come, but he believed that it would be swift and certain. He had done all that Vogel required of him; and, beyond that, he survived only as a potential menace, to be logically obliter­ated as soon as possible, before he could do any further damage. Like Loretta, he felt that it must be infuriating to die, leaving so much unfinished, down there in the lonely dark, with none of the drunken exaltation of battle to give it a persuasive glory; but that was what he had gone down to do. When he still lived, he wondered what could have happened to bring him the reprieve.

Had Vogel changed his mind? That was more than the Saint could make himself believe. Or had Vogel begun to wonder whether it would be safe to kill him, when he must be presumed to have associates somewhere who knew as much as he knew and knew also where he had gone, who would make inquiries and take action when he didn't come back? The Saint could see practical difficulties in the way of casually bumping himself off which might have made even Kurt Vogel stop to think; and yet he couldn't quite convince himself that Vogel's strategic talents had at last been baffled.

He was alive without knowing why—without knowing how long that delicious surprise could last, but believing that it could not possibly last for long. And yet the instinct of life is so strong that he was more occupied with wondering how he would turn the reprieve to the most profit. Even when he was working down there on the strong-room door, believing that he had no hope of seeing the light again, that same queer instinct of survival had made him prepare for the impossible chance. Now, when he moved his arm, he could feel a wet discomfort in his sleeve that was more than compensated by the small steel instrument which slithered against his wrist—an instrument which he had not pos­sessed when he left the deck of the Falkenberg, which might yet be worth more to him than all the gold of the Chalfont Cas­tle. . . .

The water above his head thinned and lightened, became a mere