Prelude For War

hurting her, but he meant every word he had said. Circumstance had put him on to a plane where the niceties of conventional chivalry could have no weight. And she knew that it was not worth taking up the challenge.

Her lower lip thrust out petulantly.

'Damn you,' she whimpered. 'Oh, damn you!'

'I'm sorry,' he said, and meant it.

He bent over her and took the sheaf of papers out of her hand, from behind her, and touched her mouth lightly with his own as he did so.

She got up and flung herself away from him as far as the topography of the room would let her. He watched her out of the corner of his eye, balanced for any action that might be forced upon him; but the moment of danger was past. She stood by the dressing table glowering at him and biting her lips in a way that he remembered. Her ill temper had something very childish and almost charming about it: she was like a little girl in a pet.

He sat down on the bed with the sheaf of papers in his hand.

'Are you going to Scotland for the grouse?' he inquired amiably.

She took her bag off the dressing table, jerked out a packet of cigarettes, lighted one and moved further away. She stood with her back to him, smoking furiously, tapping one foot on the threadbare carpet, the whole dorsal view of her expressive of raging contempt; but he observed that she was covertly watching him in the long mirror on the wardrobe.

The Saint lighted a cigarette himself and turned the pages of the dossier that had disordered so many lives and ended at least two of them.

At once he seemed to have forgotten her existence. He read more and more intently, with a frown of concentration deepening on his face. His intentness shut out everything beyond the information he was assimilating. For a long time there was no sound in the room except the irritating tattoo of Lady Valerie's toe beating on the floor, the rustle of paper and the creaking of rusty bedsprings as he stirred to turn a page.

And as he read on, a curious empty chill crept over him.

Lady Valerie fidgeted with the catch on the wardrobe door. She breathed on the mirror and drew silly faces with her forefinger in the cloud deposited by her breath, and went on stealing furtive glances at him. At last she turned round in a final fling of exasperation and stubbed out her cigarette in a saucer on the dressing table.

'Well,' she said peevishly, 'at least you might tell me what it's all about. Is it very interesting?'

'Wait a minute,' he said, without looking up.

She pushed the saucer off the dressing table with an exas­perated sweep of her hand. Instead of providing a satis­factory smash, it landed on the carpet with a thick plunk and rolled hollowly away over the linoleum under the washstand.

The Saint went on reading.

And as he came towards the end of the manuscript that dry deflated chill seemed to freeze the fire out of him and leave him numb with helpless bafflement.

For there was nothing in that bulky collection of docu­ments that seemed to be worth much more than the paper it was written on in the way of powder and shot. There were the usual notes on the organization of the arms ring, principally taken from the British end, but none of it was very new. Much of it could have been found in such detailed surveys as Merchants of Death. There were notes on Luker's background, the puppet directors of his various companies, the ramifications of their many subsidiaries, their interna­tional affiliations, their political connections, their methods of business, together