pride.
'Wilberforce Egbert Levi Gupp Was very, very well brought up, Not even in his infant crib Did he make messes on his bib, Or ever, in his riper years, Forget to wash behind his ears.
Trained from his rawest youth to rule (At that immortal Public School Whose playing fields have helped to lose Innumerable Waterloos), His brains, his wit, his chin, were all Infinitesimal, But (underline the vital fact) He was the very soul of tact.
And never in his innocence Gave anyone the least offense: Can it be wondered at that he Became, in course of time, M.P.?'
'Has that got anything to do with your Mr. Jones?' asked Patricia patiently.
'Nothing at all,' said the Saint. 'It's probably far more important. Posterity will remember Wilberforce Gupp long after Comrade Jones is forgotten. Listen to some more:
'Robed in his faultless morning dress They voted him a huge success.
The sober drabness of the garb Fittingly framed the pukka sahib; And though his many panaceas Showed no original ideas, Gupp, who could not be lightly baulked, Just talked, and talked, and talked, and talked, Until the parliamentary clan Prophesied him a coming man.'
'I seem to have heard something in the same strain before,' the girl remarked.
'You probably have,' said the Saint. 'And you'll probably hear it again. So long as there's ink in my pen, and I can make two words rhyme, and this country is governed by the largest collection of soft-bellied halfwits and doddering grandmothers on earth, I shall continue to castigate its imbecilities-whenever I have time to let go tankard of old ale. I have not finished with Wilberforce.'
'Shall I be seeing you after I leave Marion's?' she asked; and the Saint was persuaded to put away the sheet of paper on which he had been scribbling and tell her something which amazed her.
He expounded a theory which anyone else would have advanced hesitantly as a wild and delirious guess with such vivid conviction that her incredulity wavered and broke in the first five minutes. And after that she listened to him with her heart beating a little faster, helplessly caught up in the simple audacity of his idea. When he put it to her as a question she knew that there was only one answer.
'Wouldn't you say it was worth trying, old Pat? We can only be wrong-and if we are it doesn't cost a cent. If we're right --'
'I'll be there.'
She went out at six o'clock with the knowledge that if his theory was right they were on the brink of an adventure that would have startled the menagerie of filleted young men and sophisticated young women whom she had promised to help to entertain. It might even have startled a much less precious audience, if she had felt disposed to talk about it; but Patricia Holm was oblivious of audiences-in which attitude she was the most drastic possible antithesis of Simon Templar. Certainly hone of the celebrated or nearly celebrated prodigies with whom it pleased Marion Lestrange to crowd her drawing room once a month would have believed that the girl who listened so sympathetically to their tedious autobiographies was the partner in crime of the most notorious buccaneer of modern times.
The cocktail party ploughed on through a syrupy flood of mixed alcohols, mechanical compliments, second-hand scandal, vapid criticism, lisps, beards, adolescent philosophy, and personal pronouns. Patricia attended with half her mind, while the other half wondered why the egotism which was so delightful and spell-binding in the Saint should be so nauseatingly flatulent in the assorted hominoids around her. She watched the hands of her wrist watch creep round to seven and seven-thirty, and wondered if the Saint could have been wrong.
It was ten minutes to eight when her hostess came and told her that she was wanted on the telephone.
'Is that you, Pat?' said the Saint's voice. 'Listen- I've had the most amazing luck. I can't tell you about it now. Can you get away?'
The girl felt a cold tingle run up her spine.
'Yes-I can come now. Where are you?'
'I'm at the May Fair. Hop into a taxi and hurry along-I'll wait for you in the lounge.'
She pulled on her hat and coat with a feeling somewhere between fear and elation. The interruption had come so exactly as the Saint had predicted it that it seemed almost uncanny. And the half-dozen bare and uninformative sentences that had come through the receiver proved beyond doubt that the mystery was boiling up for an explosion that only Simon Templar would have gone out of his way to interview at close quarters. As she ran down the stairs, the fingers of her right hand ran over the invisible outlines of a hard squat shape that was braced securely under her left arm, and the grim contact gave her back the old confidence of other dangerous days.
A taxi came crawling along the curb as she stepped out into Cavendish Square, and she waved to it and climbed in. The cab pulled out again with a jerk; and it was then that she noticed that the glass in the windows was blackened, and protected against damage from the inside by a closely woven mesh of steel wire.
She leaned forward and felt around in the darkness for a door handle. Her fingers encountered only a smooth metal plate secured over the place where the handle should have been; and she knew that the man who called
