"Natalie Sheridan," she said. "Canadian. Divorced one year. No torch, but I did feel like a fling, and I'd read so much about Europe. The only thing I hadn't thought about, practically, was just how a gal would make out from day to day, traveling alone. It was all right in London and Paris, because I was with friends all the time — but then they were going to Scandinavia and I wanted to see the Riviera. It was even all right in Monte Carlo, though, because I met an English woman on the train coming down, and we sort of stuck together. But I've been here on my own now for three days, and tonight I got desperate."
"It can be a problem, I imagine."
"The first night, I had dinner here and went straight to bed. Lunch, wasn't so difficult, somehow. But the second night, I was afraid to go to any fancy place: I went into another restaurant very early, it was almost empty, and then I went to a movie and went to bed. Tonight I decided it was just silly, I could waste a whole vacation like that, and why shouldn't I act like a healthy modern gal with her own traveler's checks? So I got all dressed up and swore I would have some fun. But—"
"Other people had other ideas about the kind of fun you ought to have?"
"Over here, they don't seem to understand that a gal can be alone because she wants to. If she isn't waiting for one man, she must be waiting for any man. I've never had so many strange men trying to be so charming. Of course, most of them were just devastatingly discreet, but all the same. after a while, it gets to be like a kind of nightmare. And then when I felt the waiters beginning to worry about me, it was the end."
"So you decided that if everyone was thinking it, you might as well be it?" he asked, with lazy wickedness.
"Oh, no! But when you came in, I was about frantic, and you looked English or American or — or as if you might understand, anyway. And I did try to pick you up, and I shouldn't be wasting your time. But if you would just have your drink, so that I can sit here for a little while and enjoy staring at everyone else instead of them staring at me, and let me pay for it, and then escort me out so I can make a graceful exit—"
The Saint finally laughed, cutting off her spate of headlong clauses with a muted outburst of sheer delight. He threw back his head and shook with it irrepressibly, subduing only the sound of the guffaw, while the waiter delivered his St-Raphaël and went phlegmatically away.
"Natalie, I love you. I thought I'd been picked up in every way there was, in the course of a misspent life, but you've shown me that there can always be new things to live for." He sat up again, still smiling, and not unkindly. "I'll tell you what. We'll have this drink, and then another, on me, and enjoy the passing show together. And after that, if you can still stand the company, I'd like to introduce you to a little side-street restaurant, Chez Francis, where you can eat the best Provençal sea-foods in this town. Until you've tasted Francis' coquillages farcis, you've only been gastronomically slumming."
That had been the beginning of what looked at first like the most beautifully innocuous friendship in the Saint's life story. Her ignorance of everything European was abysmal, but her lively interest made kindergarten instruction surprisingly enjoyable. Experiencing for the first time places and foods and wines that were so familiar to him, she made them new to him again with the spice of her own excitement. He got almost a proprietary kick out of first emphasizing the murky waters and overcrowded sands of the Croisette beaches, until she was as saddened as a child with a broken toy, and then taking her on a mere fifteen-minute ferry ride to the Ile Ste Marguerite and over the eucalyptus-shaded walks to the clean rocky coves on the other side which only a few fortunate tourists ever find. And when he gave her one of the glass-and-rubber masks which are almost one of the minimum garments required of Mediterranean bathers today, and she made her personal discovery of the underwater fairyland that only encumbered divers had ever glimpsed before this generation, she clung to him with real sexless tears flooding her big hazel eyes.
Except for that one spontaneous clutch, she was neither cold nor coquettish. It must be faced — or who are we kidding? — that few women could be with the Saint for long and want to leave him alone, and that passes had been made at him in more ways than a modest man would try to remember, and that he could scarcely help revealing even in subtle ways that he was prepared for the worst and poised for evasive action. But Natalie Sheridan gave him nothing to fight. She made no overt attempt to bring him closer to her bed, while at the same time leaving no doubt that he might be very welcome there, some other night, when certain other conjunctions were auspicious. This alone was a refreshing change from more hackneyed hazards.
Nor was she asking to be rescued from any dragons or deadfalls, except the almost adolescent insecurity which had made her beseech him in the first place.
He had told her soon enough, inevitably, but with all the misgivings that could be rooted in a hundred prologues like this: "My name is Sebastian Tombs, believe it or not."
She had said: "Of course I believe it. People always do, when the Saint tells them that, don't they?"
It was at this memorable moment that he finally decided that the time had come at last when the pseudonym which had given him so much childish amusement for so many years must be put away in honorable retirement. He would never feel confident of fooling anyone with it again, and indeed he realized that he had been more than lucky to get away with it on the last several occasions when a perverse sentimental attachment had made him risk it just once more.
But even so, Natalie had surprised him again. She hadn't followed up the identification with the usual babble of silly questions, or embarrassing flattery, or the equally routine recollection of some flagrant injustice, public or private, which he simply must do something about. She seemed perfectly satisfied to enjoy his company as an attractive man, without pestering him for reminiscences or otherwise reminding him that he was a kind of international celebrity, in the most refreshingly natural camaraderie.
It was almost too good to be true.
On the third evening, she handed him a sealed envelope.
"That's for last night," she said. "I saw exactly what you spent — I've got very sharp eyes. Tonight is on you, if you like. But about every other time it has to be on me, if we're going on doing this. Now don't get on a high horse. I'm not going to insult you by offering more than my share, and don't you insult me by trying to make me a parasite. You don't have to pick up all the checks until you're married to me or keeping me, and I haven't heard you offer to do either yet."
This was altogether too much.
"What on earth did your husband divorce you for?" he asked.
"He didn't. I divorced him."
"Then put it another way. Why did he let you?"
"Why should I tell you what's wrong with me? If I don't, there's always a chance you may never find out."
Nothing else had beclouded the idyllic relationship until Mrs. Bertha Noversham had arrived. Mrs. Noversham was the English woman whom Natalie had met on the Blue Train and whose company in Monte Carlo had postponed the problems of solitude. She had been to Corsica on the yacht of some titled plutocrats whom she had met at a roulette table and adopted as old friends on the basis of having seen them several times in the most fashionable London restaurants — Natalie had already told Simon about Mrs. Noversham's steamroller methods of enlarging her circle of acquaintances.