And for once the hunch had been wrong. If only it hadn't been for that humdrumly handsome excrescence in the striped blazer. . .
Simon looked up again for another tantalizing eyeful of the dark slender girl.
He was just in time to get a parting glimpse of her back as she made her way to the door, with the striped blazer hovering over her like a motherly hen. Then she was gone; and everyone else in the bar suddenly looked nondescript and obnoxious.
The Saint sighed.
He took a deep draught of his beer, and turned back to Hoppy Uniatz. The neck of the bottle was still firmly clamped in Hoppy's mouth, and there was no evidence to show that it had ever been detached therefrom since it was first inserted. His Adam's apple throbbed up and down with the regularity of a slow pulse. The angle of the bottle indicated that at least a pint of its contents had already reached his interior.
Simon gazed at him with reverence.
'You know, Hoppy,' he remarked, 'when you die we shan't even have to embalm you. We'll just put you straight into a glass case, and you'll keep for years.'
The other customers had finally returned to their own business, except for a few who were innocently watching for Mr Uniatz to stiffen and fall backwards; and the talkative young barman edged up again with a show of wiping off the bar.
'Nothing much here to interest you tonight, sir, is there ?' he began chattily.
'There was,' said the Saint ruefully. 'But she went home.'
'You mean the dark young lady, sir?'
'Who else?'
The man nodded knowingly.
'You ought to come here more often, sir. I've often seen her in here alone. Miss Rosemary Chase, that is. Her father's Mr Marvin Chase, the millionaire. He just took the New Manor for the season. Had a nasty motor accident only a week ago . . .'
Simon let him go on talking, without paying much attention. The dark girl's name wasn't Nora Prescott, anyhow. That seemed to be the only important item of information— and with it went the last of his hopes. The clock over the bar crept on to twenty minutes past eight. If the girl who had written to him had been as desperate as she said, she wouldn't come as late as that—she'd have been waiting there when he arrived. The girl with the strained blue eyes had probably been suffering from nothing worse than biliousness or thwarted love. Rosemary Chase had happened merely by accident. The real writer of the letter was almost certainly some fat and frowsy female among those he had passed over without a second thought, who was doubtless still gloating over him from some obscure corner, gorging herself with the spectacle of her inhibition's hero in the flesh.
A hand grasped his elbow, turning him round, and a lightly accented voice said: 'Why, Mr Templar, what are you looking so sad about ?'
The Saint's smile kindled as he turned.
'Giulio,' he said, 'if I could be sure that keeping a pub would make anyone as cheerful as you, I'd go right out and buy a pub.'
Giulio Trapani beamed at him teasingly.
'Why should you need anything to make you cheerful? You are young, strong, handsome, rich—and famous. Or perhaps you are only waiting for a new romance?'
'Giulio,' said the Saint, 'that's a very sore point, at the moment.'
'Ah! Perhaps you are waiting for a love-letter which has not arrived ?'
