Read Saint Overboard for Free Online

on the job
of saving a lost soul? Of course you might always get lost yourself, but that wouldn’t
matter. We could always console each other.”
    “I wonder why Ingerbeck’s didn’t think
of signing you up years ago.”
    He smiled.
    “They might have tried, but I’m afraid I
haven’t got any sort of affinity for dotted lines. Besides, I’m not naturally
honest. You try to recover stolen property for the insurance companies, don’t
you?”
    “That’s part of the job.”
    “Well, I do the same thing, but not for
any insurance com pany.”
    “Not even on a ten per cent
commission?”
    “I have worked on that basis, but it was a long time ago. My tastes were a lot more innocent and simple in
those days.”
    “It’s not a bad reward, when there are
millions to look for,” she said temptingly.
    He sighed.
    “It’s so dull to be honest. Nobody else
but you could make it even bearable. But I know what you mean. I’m on a
holiday, and I can always pick up a few millions some other time. It
was your picnic originally, and you let me in on it—— ”
    “I needn’t have done that.”
    There was a cool and rather sad finality in
her voice, so much in contrast to the wavering dance of her eyes, that he
looked at her
keenly for a moment before replying. In that vivid and care free surround of laughing swimmers and
brightly-clad sunbathers he felt a
shadow round them, cutting them off in a dynamic isolation of their own from all these thoughtless and ordinary things.
    “It was my charm,” he explained at
length. “My father-con fessor touch. You just couldn’t resist
me.”
    She shook her head. The gold flashed in her
hair, and her lips smiled; but the light mockery of her eyes was subdued to
an elfin seriousness.
    “I mean I needn’t have given up hope and gone in for such desperate measures so soon.”
    “What’s happened?” he asked; and
the brown smooth-muscled arm on which he was propped up turned so that his hand closed over hers.
    She looked down at him steadily, and the
shadow around them failed to touch her enchanting face.
    “I had a note this morning,” she said. “It was
delivered at the hotel before I woke up.
I’ve got an invitation to have dinner with
Vogel on the Falkenberg.”
     
     
    II.       HOW SIMON TEMPLAR ALSO
RECEIVED AN INVITATION,
    AND A PAIR OF PINK SOCKS
HOVE UP ON THE HORIZON
     
    A STOUT
gentleman ambled by, with a green eyeshade on his brow and a diminutive slip clinging by some miracle of adhesion to the reentrant curve of his abdomen, looking
like a debauched Roman emperor on his
way to the bath; a Parisian sylph in a startling
lace costume that left nothing except her birthday to the imagination arranged her white limbs
artistically under a gaudy sunshade
and waited for the rush of art students to gather round; two children
disputing the ownership of a bucket opened up on a line of personalities that
would have left a couple of bootleggers
listening in awe; but these were events that might have been happening on another planet.
    He remembered the speedboat tied up alongside
the Falk enberg, which had not been there before.
    “You hadn’t got some crazy idea of
accepting, had you?” he said mechanically.
    “It’s what I’ve been waiting for.”
    “I know, but— What do you think happened
last night?”
    She took one of his cigarettes.
    “I don’t think I could have been seen. I
didn’t see the man who caught me—he came up behind. And it was pretty dark where I was. He caught me round
the neck with his arm; then I fired the
shot, he let go, and I dived.”
    “He’d know it was a woman.”
    “Not necessarily. Don’t you remember
that Vogel said he was looking for a man?”
    “An obvious lie.”
    “A very stupid one—if it was. But what
could it gain him? If you’d already seen a woman, it’d make you
think there was something
queer going on. If you hadn’t, what did it matter?”
    “He might have been trying to tempt me
to keep up the lie—