when he thought of inconsequential things with an incomparably vivid rapture, and saw commonplace things with an exquisite sensuous delight that could not have been put into words. He couldn't even recollect how long it lasted, that voluptuous realisation of the act of living; he only knew that at the end of it he saw the black bulk of a ship looming up towards him with a tiny white crest at her bows, and had to start swimming to save himself from being run down. Somehow the swim brought him close to the north bank of the river, and he cruised idly upstream until he found a flight of stone steps leading up into a narrow alley between two buildings. The alley led into a narrow dingy street, and somewhere along the street he found a taxi which, in an unlikely spot like that, could only have been planted there for his especial service by a guardian angel with a most commendable sense of responsibility.
The driver peered at him keenly in the light of the melancholy street lamp under which the cab was parked.
'You're wet,' he said at last, with the same pride of discovery that must have throbbed in Charles Darwin's breast when he gave the fruit of his researches to the world.
'You know, George, I believe you've hit it,' said the Saint, in a whisper of admiring awe in which the old unconquerable mockery was beginning to lift itself again. 'I thought something was wrong, but I couldn't make out what it was. Do you think I can have been in some water?'
The driver frowned at him suspiciously.
'Are you drunk?' he asked, with disarming frankness; and the Saint shook his head.
'Not yet-but I have a feeling that with very little encouragement I could be. I want to go to Cornwall House, Piccadilly; and I'll pay for any damage I do to your lovely cushions.'
Probably it was the tone and manner of what the chauffeur would have described as a toff which dissolved suspicion away into a tolerant appreciation of aristocratic eccentricity, and induced him to accept the fare. At any rate, he accepted it, and even went so far as to oblige Simon with a cigarette.
Lounging back in a corner with the smoke sinking luxuriously into his lungs, the Saint felt his spirits rising with the speed of an irresponsible rocket. The ordeal he had been through, the shadow of death and the strange supreme joy of life after it, slipped back into the annals of memory. To the High Fence, he was dead: he had been dropped off a boat into the lower waters of the Thames with a lump of iron tied to his feet-swallowed up in the bottom ooze and slime of the river, where any secret might well be safe. Both as a proven interferer and a potentially greater menace, he had been removed. But before being drowned, he had given up his secret. He had told exactly what he had done with the parcel of precious stones of which Mr. Clive Enderby had been bereaved-and the High Fence was going to Harwich to take the name of Joshua Pond in vain. . . . And Simon Templar had an increasingly blissful idea that he was going to be there to witness the performance.
As the cab drew up before Cornwall House he saw a girl and a man coming out, and decanted himself on to the pavement before the taxi had properly reached a standstill.
'Are you looking for some fun, souls?' he murmured. 'Because if so, I could use you.'
Patricia Holm stared at him for a moment in breathless silence; and then, with an incoherent little cry, she threw herself into his arms. . . .
Mr. Uniatz swallowed, and touched the Saint with stubby fingers, as if he were something fragile.
'Howja get wet, boss?' he asked.
Simon grinned, and indicated the interested taxi driver with a movement of his head.
'George here thinks I must have been in some water,' he said. 'Give him a quid for the inspiration, will you?-I only had a fiver on me when I went out, but they pinched it.'
He led Patricia back into the building with a damp arm round her shoulders, while Hoppy paid off the taxi and rejoined them in the foyer. They rode up in the elevator in an enforced silence; but Patricia was shaking him by the arm as soon as the door of the apartment had closed behind them.
'Where have you been, boy? What's happened?'
'Were you worried?'
'You know that.'
He kissed her.
'I guess you must have been. Where were you off to?'
'We were going to call on Enderby.' She was still holding herself in the curve of his arm, wet as he was. 'It was the only line we had-what you told me outside here, before Pryke took you off.'
'I could of made him talk, boss,' said Mr. Uniatz, in a tone of pardonable disappointment. 'After I'd got t'ru wit' him---------'
The Saint smiled.
'I suppose he'd 've been lucky to be able to talk. Well, the scheme might still be a good one. . . .' He toyed with the idea for a thoughtful moment; and then he shook his head. 'But no-we don't need it now. And there may be something much more useful for you to do. Get me a drink, Pat, if Hoppy's left anything, and I'll tell you.'
Half an hour in his sodden clothes had left him chilled and shivery, but a steep tot of whisky would soon put that right. He lay submerged in a hot bath, with the glass balanced on the edge, and told them the story of his adventures through the open door. It was a tale that made Patricia bite her lips towards the end; but for him it was all in the past. When he came through into the living room again, cheerful and glowing from the massage of a rough towel, with his hair sleekly brushed again and a woolly bath-robe slung round him, lighting a cigarette with steady hands and the old irrepressible laughter on his lips, it was difficult to imagine that barely an hour ago he had fought one of his most terrific fights with death.
'So here we are,' he said, with the blue lights crisp and dancing in his eyes. 'We don't know who the High Fence is; but we know where he's going, and we know the password he's going to give. It's rather quiet and logical; but we've got him. Just because he's made that one natural mistake. If I were swinging at the bottom of the Pool, as he thinks I am, there wouldn't be a snag in his life. He'd just go to Harwich and recover his boodle; and that would be the end of a spot of very satisfactorily settled bother. But he's going to have a surprise.'
'Can we come with you?' said Patricia.
