and chair at which Hoppy Uniatz was dawdling over his breakfast—if any meal which ended after noon, and was washed down with a bottle of Scotch whisky, could get by with that name.
Simon stood just inside the opening and glanced over the scene.
'Any luck yet?' he asked.
Mr Uniatz shook his head.
'De guy is cuckoo, boss. I even try to give him a drink, an' he don't want it. He t'rows it up like it might be perzon.'
He mentioned this with the weighty reluctance of a psychiatrist adducing the ultimate evidence of dementia praecox.
Simon squeezed his way through and slipped a thermometer into the patient's mouth. He held Verdean's wrist with sensitive fingers.
'Don't you want to get up, Mr Verdean ?'
The bank manager gazed at him expressionlessly.
'You don't want to be late at the bank, do you ?' said the Saint. 'You might lose your job.'
'What bank ?' Verdean asked.
'You know. The one that was robbed.'
'I don't know. Where am I ?'
'You're safe now. Kaskin is looking for you, but he won't find you.'
'Kaskin,' Verdean repeated. His face was blank, idiotic. 'Is he someone I know?'
'You remember Angela, don't you ?' said the Saint. 'She wants to see you.'
Verdean rolled his head on the pillows.
'I don't know. Who are all these people ? I don't want to see anyone. My head's splitting. I want to go to sleep.'
His eyes closed under painfully wrinkled brows.
Simon let his wrist fall. He took out the thermometer, read it, and sidled back to the door. Patricia was standing there.
'No change?' she said; and the Saint shrugged.
'His temperature's practically normal, but his pulse is high. God alone knows how long it may take him to get his memory back. He could stay like this for a week; or it might even be years. You never can tell. .. I'm beginning to think I may have been a bit too hasty with my rescuing-hero act. I ought to have let Kaskin and Dolf work him over a bit longer, and heard what he had to tell them before I butted in.'
Patricia shook her head.
'You know you couldn't have done that.'
'I know.' The Saint made a wryly philosophic face. 'That's the worst of trying to be a buccaneer with a better nature. But it would have saved the hell of a lot of trouble, just the same. As it is, even if he does recover his memory, we're going to have to do something exciting ourselves to make him open up. Now, if we could only swat him on the head in the opposite direction and knock his memory back again——'
He broke off abruptly, his eyes fixed intently on a corner of the room; but Patricia knew that he was not seeing it. She looked at him with an involuntary tightening in her chest. Her ears had not been quick enough to catch the first swish of tyres on the gravel drive which had cut off what he
