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think you could call it a date for Friday.”
    She nodded with a queer childish gravity.
    “I believe you’d do it. You sound very sure of everything. But what would you do with the emeralds after you got them?”
    “I expect we could trade them in for a couple of hamburgers—maybe more.”
    “You couldn’t sell them.”
    “There are ways and means.”
    “You couldn’t sell stones like that. I’m sure you couldn’t. Everything in a famous collection like that would be much too well known. If you took them into a dealer he’d recognize them at once, and then you’d be arrested.”
    The Saint smiled. It has never been concealed from the lynx-eyed student of these chronicles that Simon Templar had his own very human weaknesses; and one of these was very much akin to the one which had contributed so generously to the unpopularity of Lieutenant Corrio. If the Saint made himself considerably less ridiculous with it, it was because he was a very different type of man. But the Saint had his own deeply planted vanities; and one of these was a deplorable weakness of resistance to the temptation to display his unique knowledge of the devious ways of crime, like a peddler spreading his wares in the market place before a suitably impressed and admiring audience.
    “Three blocks north of here, on Fifty-second Street,” he said, “there’s a little bar where you can find the biggest fence in the United States any evening between five and eight o’clock. He’ll take anything you like to offer him across the table, and pay top prices for it. You could sell him the English crown jewels if you had them. If I borrow Oppenheim’s emeralds on Friday night I’ll be rid of them by dinnertime Saturday, and then we’ll meet for a celebration and see where you’d like to go for a vacation.”
    He was in high spirits when he took her home much later to the lodginghouse where he had found her a room the night before. There was one virtue in the indulgence of his favourite vice : talking over the details of a coup which he was freshly planning in his mind helped him to crystallize and elaborate his own ideas, gave him a charge of confidence and optimistic energy from which the final strokes of action sprung as swiftly and accurately as bullets out of a gun. When he said good night to her he felt as serene and exhilarated in spirit as if the Vanderwoude emeralds were already his own. He was in such good spirits that he had walked a block from the lodginghouse before he remembered that he had left her without trying to induce her to take some money for her immediate needs, and without making any arrangement to meet her again.
    He turned and walked back. Coincidence, an accident of time involving only a matter of seconds, had made incredible differences to his life before: this, he realized later, was only another of those occasions when an overworked guardian angel seemed to play with the clock to save him from disaster.
    The dimly lighted desert of the hall was surrounded by dense oases of potted palms, and one of these obstructions was in a direct line from the front door, so that anyone who entered quietly might easily remain unnoticed until he had circumnavigated this clump of shrubbery. The Saint, who from the ingrained habit of years of dangerous living moved silently without conscious effort, was just preparing to step around this divinely inspired decoration when he heard someone speaking in the hall and caught the sound of a name which stopped him dead in his tracks. The name was Corrio. Simon stood securely hidden behind the fronds of imported vegetation and listened for as long as he dared to some of the most interesting lines of dialogue which he had ever overheard. When he had heard enough, he slipped out again as quietly as he had come in and went home without disturbing Janice Dixon. He would get in touch with her the next day; for the moment he had something much more urgent to occupy his mind.
    It Is possible that even