she declined with fearful cordiality, and sank one hip on the edge of a table.
'Tell me about him.'
'He's,been buying iridium in the black market. I heard him talking about it to Mr Linnet.'
Her voice became a little vague towards the end of the sentence, as if her mind had already begun to wander. Her eye had already been wandering, but only in a very limited way. Nevertheless, it had not taken long to lose a large part of its impaling vigor. It was, in fact, becoming almost wistful.
'Do you like dancing?' she asked.
'I can take it or leave it alone,' said the Saint cautiously. 'Who is Mr Linnet?'
'He's in the same kind of business as my husband. He makes electrical things. My husband, of course, is president of the Our-ley Magneto Company.' Her rapidly melting eye traveled specu-latively over the Saint's tall symmetrical frame. 'You look as if you could do a wonderful rumba,' she said.
Only the Saint's incomparable valor, which is already so well known to the entire reading public of the English-speaking world, enabled him to face the revolting tenderness of her smile without quailing.
'I hope I never disappoint you,' he said ambiguously. 'Now, about your husband----'
'Oh, yes. Of course.' Her pronunciation of the last word was a caress. 'Well, he uses a lot of iridium. I don't know much about his business--I think business is so dull, don't you?--but I know he uses it. So does Mr Linnet. Well, last night we had dinner with Mr Linnet, and--well, I had to powder my nose.'
'Not really? Even you?'
'Yes,' said Mrs Ourley vaguely. 'Well, when I came back, I just couldn't help hearing what Milton--that's my husband, Milton--and Mr Linnet were talking about.'
'Of course not.'
'Well, Mr Linnet was saying: 1 don't know what to do. I've got to have iridium to fulfil my contracts, and the market's cornered. I don't like any part of it, but they've got me over a barrel.' Then Milton said: I'll say they have. But you'll buy it and pay through the nose, just like me. You can't afford to do anything else.' And Mr Linnet said: 'I still don't like it.' Then I had to go into the room because the butler came out into the hall, so I couldn't just stand there, and of course they stopped talking about it. But I can tell you it was a terrible shock to me.'
'Naturally,' Simon agreed sympathetically.
'I mean, if Milton and Mr Linnet are buying illegal iridium, that makes them almost criminals themselves, doesn't it?'
Simon studied her seriously for a moment.
'Do you really want your husband to go to jail?' he asked bluntly.
'Good Heavens, no!' She was righteously pained. 'That's why I came to you instead of telling the police or the FBI. If Milton went to jail I just wouldn't know how to look my friends in the face. But as a patriotic citizen I have my duty to do. And it wouldn't do any harm if you frightened him a bit. I think he deserves it. He's been so mean to me lately. If you could only have heard what he said to the nicest boy that I met in Miami Beach----'
It seemed to the Saint, quite abstractly, that he might have enjoyed hearing that; but he was just tactful enough not to say so.
He said: 'What you've told me isn't exactly enough to convict him. And for that matter, it doesn't lay the black market in my lap either. But I'd like to have a talk with your husband.'
'Oh, if you only would, Mr Templar! You're sooo clever, I'm sure you could persuade him to tell you.'
'I could try,' he said noncommittally. 'Where do you live?'
'We've got a little place out at Oyster Bay. Milton will be home by half past six. If you could manage to get out there--you could say you just happened to be passing and you dropped in for a drink----'
'Tell him we met in Havana,' said the Saint, 'and put him in the right frame of mind.'
He got her out of the door with some remarkably firm and adroit maneuvering, and came back to pour himself a healthy dose of Peter Dawson and restore his nerves.
The fortunes of buccaneering had brought many women out of the wide world and thrown them into Simon Templar's life, and it is a happy fact that most of them had been what any man would agree that a woman out of the wide world ought to be, which was young and decorative and quite undomesticated. But he had to realise that sooner or later such good luck had to end; and he had no idea of ignoring Titania Ourley, in spite of her unprepossessing appearance and even more dreadful charm.
It was like that in the strange country of adventure where he had worn so many trails. When yo.u had no idea where your quarry was, there was nothing to bring it within range like the right bait. When you had no idea what your quarry was like, you had to find the right bait, and sometimes that wasn't at all easy, but when you had the right bait you were bound to get a nibble. And when you had a nibble, the rest depended on how good you were. Mrs Milton Ourley was definitely a nibble.
He reached Oyster Bay soon after six-thirty, and after the inevitable series of encounters with village idiots, characters with cleft palates, and strangers to the district, he was able to get himself directed to Mr Ourley's little place.
This little place was no larger than a fairly flourishing hotel, occupying the center of a small park. Simon watched the enormous iron-studded portal open as he approached it with the reasonable expectation of seeing the hallway flanked with a double line of periwigged footmen; but instead of that it was Mrs Ourley herself who stood fabulously revealed on the threshold, gowned and corseted in a strapless evening dress that made her-upper section look slightly like an overfilled ice cream cone.
'Simon! You darling boy! How wonderful of you to remember!'
She insisted on taking both his hands as she drew him in, and still holding on to them when he was inside-- doubtless under the impression that this gave her some of the winsome appeal of Mary Martin in her last picture.
He found himself in an immense pseudo-baronial hall cluttered with ponderous drapes and gilt furniture, and atmospherically clogged with a concentration of perfume on which it might have' been possible to float paper boats. As Mrs Ourley dragged him closer to her bosom, it became stiflingly plain that she herself was the wellspring of this olfactory soup.
'I was just driving by,' Simon began as arranged, 'and----'
'And of course you had to stop! I just knew you couldn't forget----'
'What the dabbity dab is going on here?' boomed a sudden wrathful voice from the background.
Mrs Ourley jumped away with a guilty squeal; and Simon turned to inspect Mr Ourley with as much composure as Mrs Ourley's over-zealous interpretation of her part could leave him.
'Good evening,' he said politely.
He saw a very short man with enormous shoulders and an even more enormous stomach swelling below a stiff white shirtfront. He carried a raggedly chewed cigar in thick hirsute fingers, and his black beetling brows arched up and down in apoplectic exasperation.
'Tiny!' he roared at his wife, thereby causing even the Saint to blink. 'I've told you before that I'll make no effort to control your comings and goings outside of this house, but I will not have you bringing your gigolos into my home!'
Mrs Ourley bridled automatically.
'But he's not a ... I asked him to drop in.'
'So,' said Milton Ourley thunderously. 'You admit it. Well, | this is just about the last----'
'But Milton,' she protested coldly, 'this is Mr Templar. Simon Templar. You know--the Saint.'
'Jumping Jehosaphat!' roared Mr Ourley. 'The what?'
Simon turned back from the Beauvais tapestry which he had been surveying while he allowed the first ecstatic symptoms of marital bliss to level off.
'The Saint,' he said pleasantly. 'How do you do?'
'Dabbity dab dab dab,' said Mr Ourley. A new flood of adrenalin in his blood stream caused him to inflate inwardly until he looked more than ever like a bellicose bullfrog. 'Tiny, have you gone out of your mind? Asking this crook, this--this busybody----'
'Milton,' said Mrs Ourley glacially, 'I heard you and Mr Linnet talking about iridium last night. And since Simon is trying to break up that racket, I thought it would be a good idea to bring you two together.'
Milton Ourley stared at the Saint, and his broad chest seemed to shrink one or two sizes. That might have been only an impression, for he stood as solid as a sawed-off colossus on his short stocky legs. Certainly he did not
