She stood up.
The Saint's hands rested on the arms of his chair. A dozen mad and utterly impossible urges coursed through his mind, but he knew that they were all futile. The whole atmosphere of the place, which had brought her once to a brief fascinating ripeness, was arraigned against him.
A lynx-eyed waiter ceremoniously laid a plate with a folded check on it in front of him.
Simon rose to his feet with unalterable grace and spilled money on to it. He followed her out of the room and out of the hotel, and waited while the commissionaire produced a taxi and placed it before them with the regal gesture of a magician performing a unique and exclusive miracle.
"It's all right," she said. "You needn't bother to see me home."
Through the window of the cab, with the vestige of a sardonic bow, he handed her a sealed envelope.
"You forgot something," he murmured. "That isn't like you, I'm sure."
"Oh yes," she said. "That."
She took the envelope, glanced at it and put it in her bag. It didn't seem to interest her particularly.
She put out her hand again. He held it.
"If—" she began, and broke off raggedly.
"If what?" he asked.
She bit her lip.
"No," she said. "It wouldn't be any good. There's always the But."
"I'll buy it," said the Saint patiently. "What's the answer?"
She smiled at him rather wistfully.
"There isn't any answer. One just thinks, 'If something or other,' and then one thinks, 'But something else,' which makes it impossible," she explained lucidly. "As a matter of fact, I was thinking that you and I would make a marvellous combination."
"And why not?"
She made a little grimace. At that moment, even more inescapably than at any other, she looked as if she was on the point of bursting into tears.
"Oh, go to hell!" she said.
Her hand slipped through his fingers and she sank back into the corner of the cab. It moved away.
Simon Templar stood and watched it until the stream of traffic swallowed it up. And then he said "Hell and damnation!" with a meticulous clarity which caused the commissionaire to unbend in a glance of entirely misdirected sympathy before he resumed his thaumaturgical production of taxis.
2
After which various things happened that Simon Templar would have been very edified to know about.
Mr Algernon Sidney Fairwearher was sitting in the smoke room of his paralyzingly respectable and conservative club finishing an excellent cigar and enjoying a sedate post-prandial brandy and soda and the equally sedate post-prandial conversation of an august bishop, a retired ambassador and a senile and slightly lecherous baronet, when he was summoned to the telephone.
"This is Valerie," said the voice on the wire. "I'm frightfully sorry to bother you and all that, but I rather wanted your advice about something. Do you mind terribly? It's about Johnny."
"What exactly do you want my advice about?" asked Mr Fairweather uncomfortably. "That man Templar hasn't been pestering you again, I hope?"
"No — at least, not exactly," she answered. "I mean, he's quite easy to get on with really, and he simply throws money about, but he does ask rather a lot of questions."
Fairweather cleared his throat.
"The man is becoming a perfect nuisance," he said imperially. "But I think we can deal with him soon enough. I'm glad you told me about it. I'll have a word with the commissioner of police in the morning and see that he's taken care of."
"Oh no, you mustn't do that," she said quickly. "I can. take care of myself all right, and it's rather thrilling to be pestered by a famous character like the Saint. That isn't what I rang you up for. What I wanted was to ask your advice about something Johnny left with me."
"Something Kennet left with you?"
"Some papers he gave me to read only a week or two ago — a great thick wad of them."
Mr Fairweather experienced the curious sensation of feeling the walls close in on him while at the same time the floor and the ceiling began to draw together. Since he was at that moment in a booth which had very little space to spare after enveloping his own ample circumference, the sensation was somewhat horrifying.
It had caught him so completely unprepared that for a few seconds he seemed to have mislaid his voice. A cold perspiration broke out on his forehead. He felt as though he were being suffocated, but he dared not open the door of the booth to let in the air for which his lungs were aching. In fact, he drew it tighter.
"Papers?" he got out hoarsely. "What papers? What were they about?"
"I don't know. Johnny seemed to think they were terribly important; but then he thought so many things were terribly important that I just couldn't keep track of them all. So I didn't even read them."
The inward rush of the walls slackened for a moment. Mr Fairweather managed to snatch a handful of oxygen into his chest.
"You didn't read them?" he echoed weakly. "Well, I'd better have a look at those papers. It's a good thing you told me about them. I'll come round at once."
"But that wouldn't be any good," she said miserably. "You see, I haven't got the papers now. I don't even know where they are.. That's what I wanted your advice about."
The accumulation of seesaw effects was making Mr Fair-weather feel slightly seasick. He was very different from the staid and dignified gentleman who had been drinking a sedate brandy and soda only a few thousand years ago. He mopped his brow.
"You haven't got them?" he bleated shrilly. "Then who has got them?"
"Nobody. At least — it's frightfully difficult trying to tell you all at once. You see, what happened was something like this. John and I had been having a row — the usual old row about you and his father and Mr Luker and all that. I was telling him not to be ridiculous, and he suddenly shoved a great envelope full of papers into my hands and told me to go through them and then say if I still thought he was being ridiculous. Then he stormed out of the place in a fearful rage, and I had lots of things to do, and I couldn't go on carrying a whacking great envelope about with me forever, so I dumped it somewhere and I didn't think any more about it until the other day."
"How do you mean, you dumped it?" squealed Fair-weather, like a soul in torment. "You must have put it somewhere. Where is it?"
"That's just what I don't know," she said. "Of course it must be somewhere; I mean, I didn't just drop it over the side of a bus or anything like that. But I simply can't remember where I had it last. I've got a sort of idea that it might be in the cloakroom at Piccadilly Station, or I may have left it in the cloakroom at the Savoy. In fact, I'm pretty sure I did put it in a cloakroom somewhere."
Fairweather clung to the telephone bracket for support.
"Then you. must have a ticket for it," he pointed out with heart-rending logic. "Why don't you look for the ticket?"
"But I can't," she said plaintively. "It's a terrible bore. You see, if I had a ticket it was probably in my bag, and of course that was lost in the fire with all my other things."
"But—" said Fairweather.
The word "but" is not commonly used to convey the more cosmic intensities of emotion, but Mr Fairweather's pronunciation imbued it with a depth and colour that can rarely if ever have been achieved before. The exasperation of a reasonable man who finds himself in an unreasonable and chaotic universe, the sharp horror of a prisoner on an excavating party who learns that he has kindly been allowed to dig his own grave, the outraged protest of a mathematician to whom has been demonstrated an insuperable fallacy in his proof that two and two make four — all these several shades of travail were summed up and vivified in Mr Fairweather's glorification of the word "but."