The Saint and Mr Teal (Once More the Saint)

piece of coast all to myself and acquire the same beautiful colour all over.'

Mr. Toby Halidom, who was wearing an Old Harrovian tie, looked faintly shocked; but Mr. Stride was unmoved.

He accompanied Simon onto the deck, with Laura Berwick, when the Saint excused himself as soon as coffee had been served. One of the men, he said, would take Mr. Hum Ha back to St. Mary's in the motor dinghy; and while the boat was being brought round Simon glanced across again to the Luxor. A seaman was standing on the deck, looking towards them, and as Simon came into view the man turned and spoke through a hatch to someone below. A moment later the man who had watched the Saint before came up the companion and adjusted his binoculars again.

'I hope we shall see some more of you,' said Mr. Stride, standing by the gangway. 'Come and pay us a call whenever you like.'

'I should love to,' murmured the Saint, just as politely; and then, with such a smooth transition that the effect of it was like a gunshot, he said: 'I didn't know Abdul Osman was short-sighted.'

Galbraith Stride went white, as if the blood had been drained from his face by a vacuum pump.

'Do you know Mr. Osman?' he asked, with an effort.

'Fairly well,' said the Saint casually. 'I branded him on both cheeks five years ago, and it must have cost him no end of money in plastic surgeons to put his face right again. If anyone had done that to me I shouldn't have to look at him twice through field glasses to be sure who it was.'

'Very interesting,' said Galbraith Stride slowly. 'Very interesting.' He held out his hand. 'Well, good-bye, Mr.-er- hum.'

'Templar,' said the Saint. 'Simon Templar. And thanks so much for the lunch.'

He shook the proffered hand cordially and went down to the boat; and he was so happy that he wanted to sing to himself all the way back to St. Mary's.

CHAPTER III

'IF,' said Patricia Holm, 'that was supposed to be another of your famous Exercises in Tact --'

'But what else could it have been?' protested the Saint. 'If I hadn't used extraordinary tact, I shouldn't have been invited to lunch; and that would have meant I'd have missed a display of caviare, lobster mayonnaise, and dry champagne that no man with a decent respect for his stomach could resist-not to mention a first-hand knowledge of the geography of Stride's boat --'

'And by dinnertime,' said Patricia, 'she'll be fifty miles away, with the Luxor racing her.'

Simon shook his head.

'Not if I know Abdul Osman. The surgeons may have refashioned his face, but there are scars inside him that he will never forget. ... I should have had to scrape an acquaintance with Laura some time, and that accident made it so beautifully easy.'

'I thought we were coming here for a holiday,' said Patricia; and the Saint grinned and went in search of Mr. Smithson Smith.

Mr. Smithson Smith was the manager of Tregar­then's, which is one of the three hotels with which the island of St. Mary's is provided. Simon Templar, whose taste in hotels could be satisfied by nothing less lavish than palaces like the Dorchester, failing which he usually plunged to the opposite extreme, had declined an invitation to stay there, and had billeted himself in a house in the village, where he had a private sitting room thrown in with the best of home-cooked meals for a weekly charge that would have maintained him in an attic at the Dorchester for about five minutes. At Tregarthen's, however, he could stay himself with draught Bass drawn from the wood, and this was one of the things of which he felt in need.

The other thing was a few more details of local gossip, with which Mr. Smithson Smith might also be able to provide him.

It was then half-past three in the afternoon; but by a notable oversight on the part of the efficient legislators who framed that unforgettable Defense of the Realm Act which has for so long been Britain's bulwark against the horrors of an invasion of foreign tourists, the Scilly Islands were omitted from the broad embrace of that protection, and it is still lawful to drink beer at almost any hour at which a man can reasonably raise a thirst. As Simon entered the long glass-fronted veranda over­looking the bay, he naturally expected to find it packed to suffocation with sodden islanders wallowing in the decadent excesses from which a beneficent government had not been thoughtful enough to protect them; but such (as the unspeakable newspapers say, in what they apparently believe to be the English language) was not the case. In fact, the only occupant of the bar was Mr. Smithson Smith himself, who was making out bills be­side an open window.

'Why-good-afternoon, Templar. What can I do for you ?'

'A pint of beer,' murmured the Saint, sinking into a chair. 'Possibly, if my thirst holds, two pints. And one for yourself if you feel like it.'

Mr. Smithson Smith disappeared into his serving cubicle and returned with a brimming glass. He ex­cused himself from joining in the performance.

'I'd rather leave it till the evening, if you don't mind,' he said with a smile. 'What have you been doing today?'

He was a thin, mild-mannered man with sandy grey hair, a tiny moustache, and an extraordinary gentle voice; and it was a strange thing that he was only one of many men in those islands who were more familiar with the romantic cities of the East than they were with the capital of their own country. Simon had been struck by that odd fact on his first call at Tregarthen's, and subsequent visits had confirmed it. There, on those lonely clusters of rock breaking out of the sea forty miles from Land's End, where you would expect to find men who had seen scarcely anything of the world out­side the other rocky islands around their own homes, you found instead simple men whose turns of remi­niscence recalled the streets of Damascus and Bagdad by their names. And whenever reminiscence turned that way Mr. Smithson Smith would call on his own memo­ries, with a faraway look in his eyes, and the same faraway sound in that very gentle voice, as if his dreams saw the deserts of Arabia more vividly than the blue bay beyond his windows. 'I mind a time when I was in Capernaum . . .'-Simon had heard him say it, and felt that for that man at least all the best days lay in the past. It was the war, of course, that had picked men out of every sleepy hamlet in England and hurled them into the familiarity of strange sights and places as well as the flaming shadows of death, and in the end sent some of them back to those same sleepy hamlets to remember; but