Read Saint Overboard for Free Online Page B

holiday?”
    “Let’s have a drink and talk about it.”
    She shook her head.
    “I can’t risk it. Vogel may be ashore
now—he may be any where. I’ve risked enough to talk to you at all. If
you’ve changed your mind since last night, we’ll fight over it.”
    “Did I tell you I’d made up my
mind?” Simon inquired mildly.
    “You let me think you had. I took a
chance when I told you the story. I wanted you to know. I still
do.” She was facing him without banter now, cool and possessed and momentarily
unpossessable , and yet with a shadow of
wistfulness deepening in her gaze. “I think Ingerbeck himself would have
done the same. We might get a long
way together; and if we came through there’d be plenty of commission to split.
Just once, it might be fun for you
to look at a dotted line.”
    His eyebrows slanted quizzically.
    “Otherwise?”
    “I suppose we can still be hung out to
dry.”
    She stood up, dusting the sand from her robe. Simon picked himself up after her, and the grey eyes came back
to his face.
    “Where should we meet on this—dotted
line?” he asked re signedly.
    “I’ll be here to-morrow. No, not here—we can’t take this risk again. Suppose I swam out and met you, off
the Pointe du Mou linet. Halfway
house. At eleven.” She smiled, as he had seen her smile once before.
“Are you looking for your pen?”
    “I can’t write, Loretta.”
    “You can make a cross.”
    “You know what that stands for?”
    “If it does,” she said, “you
signed last night.”
    He watched her walking up towards the white
spires of the Casino Balneum, with all the maddening delight of
movement in the swing of her brown body, and searched his vocabulary
for words to describe the capriciousness of fortune. Admitted that all the
gifts of that immoral goddess had strings harnessed to them—there were
strings and strings. There was no real need in adventure for quite
such a disturbing complication. And the Saint smiled in
spite of that. The beach was empty after she had left it; that is to
say, there were about a thousand other people on the Plage de l’Ecluse, but he found all
of them sickeningly bovine. Including the Parisian vamp, who by this time was
en joying the devotion of three
muscle-conscious young men, the debauched
Roman emperor, and a hungry-looking tourist from Egg Harbor, New Jersey,
who should have been old enough to know
better.
    Simon turned away from the repulsive
spectacle, and was re warded by the almost equally unwelcome vision
of Orace’s mous tache, through which something more than the sea air was
filter ing.
    “You do break out at the most unromantic
moments, Orace,” he complained; and then he saw that Orace’s
eyes were still fixed glassily on the middle distance.
    “Is that the lidy, sir?”
    Orace’s martial voice was hushed with a sort of awe; and the Saint frowned.
    “She isn’t a lady,” he said
firmly. “No lady would use such shameless eyes to try and seduce a
self-respecting buccaneer from his duty. No lady would take such a
mean advantage of a human being.” He perceived that his audience was
still scarcely following him, and looked round. “Nor is that the
wench I’m talking about, anyway. Come on away—you’ll be getting
off in a minute.”
    They walked over the sand towards the bend by
the swimming pool, where the Promenade des Alli é s curves out towards the sea.
    “If you arsk me,” Orace remarked,
recalling the grievance which had been temporarily smoothed over by
his anatomical studies,
“these Frogs are all barmy. First thing I arsks for petrol, an’ they give me paraffin. Then when I says that
ain’t what I want, they tell me
they’ve got some stuff called essence, wot’s just as good. I ‘as a smell of
this stuff, an’ blimey if it ain’t pet rol.
‘Ow the thunderinell can they ‘elp goin’ barmy wiv a langwidge like that?”
    “I don’t suppose they can help it,”
said the Saint gravely. “Did you buy some of this