The Saint Steps In

It was Mrs. Cook who came out of the kitchen while he was calling, and said: 'I think Miss Gray went out.'

'What do you mean, you think she went out?' Simon asked with icy impassivity.

'Well, after Mr. Wayvern took his man away, I heard her saying goodbye to them, and presently there was another car drove up and I think she went out. I'd heard them saying that everything was all right, and she was very excited. I thought perhaps you'd come back for her.'

'You didn't see this other car, or anyone else who came here?'

'No, sir.' He had gathered that morning that she was an optimistic creature with a happily vacant mind, but even she must have felt something in his stillness and the coldness of his voice. 'Why—is anything wrong?'

There was nothing that Simon could see any use in discuss­ing with her.

'No.'

He turned on his heel and went into the living-room, and for some minutes he stood rigidly there before he began to pace. He had exactly the same feeling, differently polarized, that an amateur criminal must have who has committed his first defalcation and then realized that he has made a fatal slip and that he must be found out and that it will only be a matter of time before they come for him, that he has changed the whole course of his life in a blithe moment and now the machinery has got him and there is nothing he can do about it. It wasn't like that for the Saint, but it felt the same.

He didn't even bother about calling Jetterick for a double check. He didn't need that melancholy confirmation. He knew.

As for calling Jetterick or Wayvern to make them do some­thing—that was just dreamy thinking. That would mean start­ing all over again. And there was nothing more to start with than there had been before, when Calvin Gray vanished. You could have all the microscopes and all the organization on earth, but you couldn't do much If nobody had seen anyone and nothing was left behind and there was nothing to start with. Not for a long time, anyway. And that might be much too long.

And under the handicaps of democratic justice, you couldn't make inspirational forays in all directions in the hope of blasting out something that would justify them. You couldn't take the bare word and extravagant theories even of a Saint as a sound basis for hurling reckless charges against a man with the power and prominence of Hobart Quennel. Because if you were pulling a boner it would be just too damn bad about you.

Unless your name happened to be Simon Templar, the Saint, and you never had given a damn.

Simon thought all that out, and hammered the shape of it into his mind.

The Ungodly had thought it out, too. Just as he'd hoped they would. But sooner.

And now he was an outlaw again, nothing else; and any riposte he made could only be in his own way.

It was five o'clock when he called Westport.

He wondered if she would be there. But she was. Her voice answered the ring, as if she had been expecting it. She might have been expecting it, too. He could take that in his stride, now, with everything else. He was on his own now, regardless of Hamilton or anyone. And all the hell-for-leather brigand lilt of the old days was rousing in his voice and edging into the piratical hardening of his blue eyes as he greeted her.

'Andrea,' he said. 'Thanks. For everything. And I decided to take you up on that invitation. I'll be over for dinner.'

6. How Hobart Quennel discoursed about Busi­ness,

and Calvin Gray did what the Saint told Him.

Mr. Hobart Quennel looked no more like a millionaire than any other millionaire; and probably he was just as secretly proud of the fact as any other up-to-date millionaire. He was one of hundreds of modern refutations of the old crude Com­munist caricatures of a captialist, so that Simon Templar won­dered whether there might be some congenital instinct of camouflage in the cosmogony of millionaires which caused them as a race to keep one jump ahead of their unpopular prototypes. It was, as if in these days of ruthless social consciousness a millionaire required some kind of protective col­oration to enable him to succeed in his declasse profession.

Mr. Quennel was physically a fairly big and well-built man, with his daughter's fair hair sprinkled with gray and balding back from his forehead, and the same pale blue inexpressive eyes. But he gave no impression of being either frightening or furtive, for in these days of higher education it is no longer so easy as it may once have been to bludgeon the crisp cabbage out of the public purse, and a man who looks either frighten­ing or furtive has too many strikes against him when he bids for the big bullion. His face was smooth and bony without being cadaverous, so that its fundamental hardness was calm and without strain. His clothes were good when you noticed them, but it was just as easy not to notice them at all. He had no softening around the middle, for that mode is also out of fashion among millionaires, who are conspicuous among seden­tary workers for being able to afford all the trainers and masseurs and golf clubs and other exercising appliances that can be prescribed to restrain the middle- aged equator. He was that new and fascinating evolution of the primitive tycoon who simply worked at the job of being a millionaire, as un-excitedly as other men worked at the job of being bricklayers, and probably with no more grandiose ideas of his place in the engine of civilisation. It was just a job in which you weighed different factors and did different things in different ways, and you had a different wage scale and standard of living; but then bricklayers were different again from cowboys, but they didn't confuse their personal reactions by thinking about cowboys.

He shook hands with the Saint, and said 'I'm very glad to meet you,' and personally poured Martinis from the shaker he had been stirring.

He had a pleasant voice and manner, dignified but cordial, neither ingratiating nor domineering. He had the soothing con­fidence of a man who didn't need to ask favors, or to go out of his way to offer them. He was a guy you could like. Simon Templar liked him in his own way, and felt just as comfortable. He sat down on the sofa beside Andrea Quennel, and crossed his long legs, and said: 'This is quite a place you have here.'

'Like it?' She sounded as if she wanted it to be liked, as if it were a new dress. 'But I think you'd like Pinehurst much more. I do. It's more sort of outdoorsy.'

She looked as sort of outdoorsy as an orchid. She wore one of those house-coat-dinner-dress effects that would get by any­where between a ballroom and a boudoir and still always have a faint air of belonging somewhere else. It had a high strapped Grecian bodice line that did sensational things for her sensa­tional torso. She had opened the door when he arrived, and it had seemed to him that her classic face and melting recep­tive mouth were like candy in a confectioner's window, lovely and desirable but without volition. He knew now that this was a fault of his own perception, but he was still inching his way through the third dimension that had to bring the whole picture into sudden life and clarity.

It felt a little unearthly to be meeting her like that, in this atmosphere of ordinary and pleasant formality, after the way they had last seen each other. He wondered what she was think­ing. But he had been able