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which would have given me away.”
    She shrugged her intoxicating shoulders.
    “Aren’t you rather looking for
trouble?” she said.
    “That’s my job,” answered the Saint
evenly. “And inciden tally, it happens to be one of the reasons
why I didn’t come to a sticky end many years ago. I’ll give you
something else. Suppose Vogel wasn’t quite happy about me last
night?”
    “Well?”
    “It was rather an unusual hour for
anyone to be up and about —messing around with fenders. Not impossible,
but unusual. And if Vogel’s the kind of man we think he is, he keeps
alive by sorting out unusual things—like I do. He couldn’t make any fuss, because
that’d be letting himself in if he was wrong. But he could puff away in
that outboard, stop the engine, and paddle back quietly on the oars. He
couldn’t have seen you—probably he couldn’t even have heard what you said—but
he could hear that there was a girl on board.”
    “Which isn’t impossible either,”
she said demurely.
    Simon frowned.
    “You forget my Saintly reputation. But still, maybe to Vogel, with his low criminal mind, it isn’t
impossible either. But it’s still unusual
enough to be worth looking at. And then there’s you.”
    “Without a reputation.”
    “And not deserving one. You’ve been
making a clear set at him for several days—weeks—whatever it is.
That again may not be impossible. It might be his money, or his beauty,
or be cause he sings so nicely in his bath. But if it isn’t even unusual, if I were
in his place I’d think it was—interesting. Interesting enough, maybe, to try
and find out some more about you.”
    She pressed his hand—she had been letting it
rest in his all that
time, as if she hadn’t noticed.
    “Dear man,” she said, “don’t you think I know all
this?”
    “And if he only wants to see exactly where you stand in the game?”
    “I can pack a gun.”
    “Like any other ordinary innocent
woman.”
    “Then I’ll go without it.”
    “You wouldn’t be much worse off.”
    “All the same, I’ll go.”
    “Three,” he quoted her, “didn’t come back.”
    She nodded. The impish humour still played on
her lips and the surface of her eyes, but the depths behind it were
clear and still.
    “When you join Ingerbeck’s, you don’t sign on for a cocktail party. You join an army. You take an oath—to do
your job, to keep your mouth shut, and to take the consequences. Wouldn’t you go?”
    “Yes. But there are special
risks.”
    “For a poor defenceless girl?”
    “Theycall it Worse than
Death.”
    “I’venever believed it.”
    He sat up and stared thoughtfully over the
water. There was a quality of lightness in her decision that ended argument
more finally than any dramatic protestations. She would go; because whatever
the risk might be, it was not fact. It was her job to find out, not to
guess.
    “I take it you’ve already accepted,”
he said wryly.
    “The messenger was going to call back
for my answer. I left a letter when I came out. I said I’d be
delighted. Maybe Kurt Vogel isn’t so bad as he’s painted,” she
said dreamily. “He left some lovely flowers with the invitation.”
    “I shouldn’t be surprised if you fell for him.”
    “I might.”
    “But now and then your conscience would
prick you. When you were riding around in your Rolls, half strangled with
di amonds, the memory of lost love would haunt you. I can see you stifling a
sob, and pressing a penny into a poor beggar’s hand before you hurry on,
because he reminds you of me.”
    “Don’t say it,” she pleaded
tremulously. “I can’t bear it. How was I to know you cared like that?”
    The Saint scratched his head.
    “I must have forgotten to tell you,”
he admitted. “Never mind.” He turned to her with cavalier blue eyes sobered to a thoughtful directness that she had seen before.
“But does it leave me
out?”
    “I don’t know,” she said steadily.
“Have you decided to break off your