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saw
you.”
    “Quite a big night, wasn’t it?”
Avalon said. She sank back on to the settee. “Come on in and have a
drink and tell us your troubles. Simon, fix something for her.”
    “I won’t stay,” Kay Natello said. “I didn’t know
you had company.”
    She hauled her angular bony frame out of its
lean-to position against the entrance arch as gauchely as she put her
spoken sentences together.
    “Don’t be so ridiculous,” Avalon
said. She was impatiently hospitable—or hospitably impatient. “We
were just talking. What did you come in for, if you didn’t want to stay for a few minutes ?”
    “I had a message for you,” Kay
Natello said. “If Mr. Templar would excuse us … ?”
    “If it’s from Cookie, Mr. Templar was
part of the ruckus, so it won’t hurt him to hear it.”
    The other woman went on pinching her lower lip
with skeletal fingers. Her shadowed eyes went back to the Saint with
completely measurable blankness, and back to Avalon again.
    “All right,” she said. “I
didn’t mean to crash in here at all, really, but Cookie made such a fuss
about it. You know how she is. She was a bit tight, and she lost her
temper. Now she’s getting tighter because she shouldn’t have. She’d like to
forget the whole thing. If you could … sort of … make it
up with her …”
    “If she feels like that,” Avalon
said, with that paralysing smiling directness which was all her own,
“why didn’t she come here herself?”
    “She’s too tight now. You know how she
gets. But I know she’s sorry.”
    “Well, when she sobers up, she can call
me. She knows where I live.”
    “I know how you feel, darling. I only
stopped in because she begged me to. … I’ll run
along now.”
    Avalon
stood up again.
    “Okay,” she said, with friendly
exhaustion. “I’ve taken a lot from Cookie before, but tonight was just
too much—that’s all. Why don’t you beat some sense into her one of these
times when she’s receptive?”
    “You know how she is,” Kay Natello
said, in that metallic monotone. “I’m sorry.”
    She hitched her wrap up once again around her
scrawny shoulders, and her hollow eyes took a last deliberate drag at the Saint.
    “Goodnight, Mr. Templar,” she said. “It was nice meeting you.”
    “It was nice meeting you,” Simon
replied, with the utmost politeness.
    He crossed to the side table again and half
refilled his glass while
he was left alone, and turned back to meet Avalon Dex ter as the outer door closed and her skirts swished through the entrance of the room again.
    “Well?” She was smiling at him, as
he was convinced now that nobody else could smile. “How do
you like that?”
    “I
don’t,” he said soberly.
    “Oh, she’s as
whacky as the rest of Cookie’s clique,” she said carelessly. “Don’t pay any attention
to her. It’s just like Cookie to try and send
an ambassador to do her apologising for her. It’d hurt too much if she ever had to do it herself. But just this once I’m not going to—— ”
    “I’m afraid you’ve missed
something,” Simon said, still soberly, and perhaps more
deliberately. “Natello didn’t come here to deliver
Cookie’s apologies. I’ve got to tell you that.”
    Avalon
Dexter carried her glass over to the side table.
    “Well,
what did she come for?”
    “You went out with a beautiful exit line.
Only it was just too good. That’s why Cookie is so unhappy now. And that’s why she
had Natello drop in. To find out what kind of a hook-up there might
be between us. It happens that there wasn’t any.” The Saint
put his glass transiently to his mouth. “But that isn’t what
Natello found out.”
    The break in her movements might have been no
more than an absent-minded search for the right bottle.
    “So
what?” she asked.
    “So I honestly didn’t mean to involve
you with anything,” he said.
    She completed the reconstruction of a
highball without any other hesitation; but when she turned to him
again with the