Mr Quarterstone saw his partner's mouth opening for another contribution.
"With--with us," he said weakly.
It was not what he might have said if he had had time to think, but he was too excited to be particular.
"Very well," said Mrs Wohlbreit. "We've read this play, Love--the Redeemer, and we think it would make a grand picture. If you haven't done anything yet about the movie rights ..."
Mr Quarterstone drew himself up. He felt as if he was in a daze from which he might be rudely awakened at any moment, but it was a beautiful daze. His heart was thumping, but his brain was calm and clear. It was, after all, only the moment with which he had always known that his genius must ultimately be rewarded.
"Ah--yes," he said with resonant calm. "The movie rights are, for the moment, open to--ah--negotiation. Naturally, with a drama of such quality, dealing as it does with a problem so close to the lives of every member of the thinking public, and appealing to the deepest emotions and beliefs of every intelligent man and woman----"
"We thought it would make an excellent farce," said Mrs Wohlbreit blandly. "It's just the thing we've been looking for for a long time." But before the stricken Mr Quarterstone could protest, she had added consolingly: "We could afford to give you thirty thousand dollars for the rights."
"Ah--quite," said Mr Quarterstone bravely.
By the time that Mrs Wohlbreit had departed, after making an appointment for the contract to be signed and the check paid over at the Paragon offices the following afternoon, his wound had healed sufficiently to let him take Mr Urlaub in his arms, as soon as the door closed, and embrace him fondly in an impromptu rumba.
"Didn't I always tell you that play was a knockout?" he crowed. "It's taken 'em years to see it, but they had to wake up in the end. Thirty thousand dollars! Why, with that money I can----" He sensed a certain stiffness in his dancing partner and hastily corrected himself: "I mean, we--we can----"
"Nuts," said Mr Urlaub coarsely. He disengaged himself and straightened the creases out of his natty suit. "What you've got to do now is sit down and figure out a way to crowbar that guy Tombs out of this."
Mr Quarterstone stopped dancing suddenly and his jaw dropped.
"Tombs?"
"Yeah! He wasn't so dumb. He had the sense to see that that play of yours was the funniest thing ever written. When we were talking about it in here he must have thought we thought it was funny, too."
Mr Quarterstone was appalled as the idea of duplicity struck him.
"Waldemar--d'you think he was trying to----"
"No. I pumped the old battle-axe on the way here. He told her he only had a part interest, but he wanted to do something for the firm and give us a surprise-- he thought he could play the lead in the picture, too."
"Has she told him----"
"Not yet. You heard what she said. She gets in touch with the author first. But we got to get him before he gets in touch with her. Don't you remember those contracts we signed yesterday? Fifty percent of the movie rights for him!"
Mr Quarterstone sank feebly on to the desk.
"Fifteen thousand dollars!" He groaned. Then he brightened tentatively. "But it's all right, Waldemar. He agreed to put fifteen thousand dollars into producing the play, so we just call it quits and we don't have to give him anything."
"You great fat lame-brained slob," yelped Mr Ur-laub affectionately. "Quits! Like hell it's quits! D'you think I'm not going to put that play on, after this? It took that old battle-axe to see it, but she's right. They'll be rolling in the aisles!" He struck a Quarterstoneish attitude. " 'I brought you a rose,' " he uttered tremulously, " 'but you turned it into a nest of vipers in my bosom. They have stabbed my heart!' My God! It's a natural! I'm going to put it on Broadway whatever we have to do to raise the dough--but we aren't going to cut that mug Tombs in on it."
Mr Quarterstone winced.
"It's all signed up legal," he said dolefully. "We'll have to spend our own dough and buy him out."
"Get your hat," said Mr Urlaub shortly. "We'll cook up a story on the way."
When Rosalind Hale walked into the Saint's apartment at the Waldorf-Astoria that afternoon, Simon Templar was counting crisp new hundred-dollar bills into neat piles.
"What have you been doing?" she said. "Burgling a bank?"
The Saint grinned.
"The geetus came out of a bank, anyway," he murmured. "But Comrades Quarterstone and Urlaub provided the checks. I just went out and cashed them."
"You mean they bought you out?"
"After a certain amount of haggling and squealing --yes. Apparently Aaron Niementhal changed his mind about backing the show, and Urlaub didn't want to offend him on account of Aaron offered to cut him in on another and bigger and better proposition at the same time; so they gave me ten thousand dollars to tear up the contracts, and the idea is that I ought to play the lead in Niementhal's bigger and better show."
She pulled off her hat and collapsed into a chair. She was no longer gaunt and masculine and forbidding, for she had changed out of a badly fitting tweed suit and removed her sallow make-up and thrown away the gold-rimmed glasses and fluffed out her hair again so that it curled in its usual soft brown waves around her face, so that her last resemblance to anyone by the name of Wohlbreit was gone.
"Ten thousand dollars," she said limply. "It doesn't seem possible. But it's real. I can see it."
"You can touch it, if you like," said the Saint. "Here." He pushed one of the stacks over the table towards her. "Fifteen hundred that you paid Quarter-stone for tuition." He pushed another. "Four thousand that you put into the play." He drew a smaller sheaf towards himself. "One thousand that I paid for my lessons. Leaving three thousand five hundred drops of gravy to be split two ways."
He straightened the remaining pile, cut it in two and slid half of it on to join the share that was accumulating in front of her. She stared at the money helplessly for a second or two, reached out and touched it with the tips of her fingers, and then suddenly she came round the table and flung herself into his arms. Her cheek was wet where it touched his face.
"I don't know how to say it," she said shakily. "But you know what I mean."
"There's only one thing bothering me," said the Saint some time later, "and that's whether you're really entitled to take back those tuition fees. After all, Homer made you a good enough actress to fool himself. Maybe he was entitled to a percentage, in spite of everything."
His doubts, however, were set at rest several months afterwards, when he had travelled a long way from New York and many other things had happened, when one day an advertisement in a New York paper caught his eye:
14th Week! Sold out 3 months ahead!
The Farce Hit of the Season:
LOVE--THE REDEEMER
by Homer Quarterstone
Imperial Theatre A Waldemar Urlaub Production
Simon Templar was not often at a loss for words, but on this occasion he was tongue-tied for a long time. And then, at last, he lay back and laughed helplessly.
"Oh well," he said. "I guess they earned it."
VII THE CHARITABLE COUNTESS
Simon templar's mail, like that of any other celebrity, was a thing of infinite variety. Perhaps it was even more so than that of most celebrities, for actors and authors and the other usual recipients of fan mail are of necessity a slightly smaller target for the busy letter-writer than a man who has been publicized at frequent intervals as a twentieth-century Robin Hood, to the despair and fury of the police officials at whose expense the publicity has been achieved. Of those correspondents who approached him under his better-known nom de guerre of "The Saint," about half were made up of people who thought that the nickname should be taken literally, and half of people who suspected that it stood for the exact opposite.