Her big brown eyes darkened, but it was not with anger. And he was finding it a little less easy to meet her gaze.
"How do you know what other problems she has?" she retorted. "Or does being called the Robin Hood of Modem Crime make you feel you have to hate all rich people on principle?"
"Not for a moment," he said. "Some of my best friends are millionaires. I've even become fairly rich myself — not by your standards, of course, but enough so that nobody could write a check that'd make me do anything I didn't want to. Which is all I ever wanted."
"Well spoken, sir," murmured Wakerose with delighted irony.
"Rowena will be glad to know that at last she's met one man who isn't a fortune hunter."
"Thank you," said the Saint. "At this stage of my chameleon career, it's cheering to find one crime I still haven't been accused of."
"I didn't mean to be rude with that Robin Hood crack,"
Rowena said. "It was meant as an honest question, like yours."
"And an understandable one," Simon said cheerfully. "So if you're worried about all the jewels you've got with you, I give you my word of honor I won't steal them while you're here. Where is your next stop?"
Wakerose chuckled again.
"I'm afraid we're staying here for at least a week, while Rowena explores all the ruins within reasonable driving range, before and after the luncheon stops which I shall select. I have convinced her that this is a much more civilized procedure than trying to combine transit with tourism, unpacking in a different hotel every night and having to pack up again every morning to set forth like gypsies without even a bathroom to call our own. Here we are assured of modern rooms and comfortable beds and clean clothes hung up in our closets, and returning in the evening is a relaxation instead of a scramble. So you will have left long before us."
"I knew there'd be a catch somewhere. So what are you planning to see tomorrow?"
"Nothing but a very unhistoric local garage, unfortunately. The fuel pump on my car elected to break down this afternoon — luckily, we were only just outside Châteaurenard. I expect to spend tomorrow spurring on the mechanic to get the repair finished by the end of the day and pretending I know exactly what he should be doing, while hoping that he will not detect my ignorance and take advantage of it to manufacture lengthy and expensive complications."
Simon could not have told anyone what made him do it, except that in a vague but superbly Saintly way it might have seemed too rare an opportunity to pass up, to take the wind out of Saville Wakerose's too meticulously trimmed sails; but he said at once: "That sounds rather dull for Rowena. I'd be happy to take her sightseeing in my car, while you keep a stern eye on the mechanical shenanigans."
Rowena Flane stared at him from behind a mask that seemed to have been hastily and incompletely improvised to cover her total startlement.
"Why should you do that?" she asked.
He shrugged, with twinkling sapphires in his gaze.
"I hadn't any definite plans for tomorrow. And I told you I didn't have to do anything I didn't want to."
"We couldn't impose on you like that," Wakerose said. "Rowena has plenty of books to read—"
"It's no imposition. But if she'd feel very stuffy about being obligated to a stranger, and it would make her feel better, she can buy the gas."
"And the lunch," she said.
"Oh, no. You couldn't afford that. The lunch will be mine."
Suddenly she laughed.
She had an extra chin and ballooning bosoms to make a billowy travesty of her merriment; yet it had something that lighted up her face, which was in absolute contrast to her stepfather's polite and faultless smile.
And from that moment the Saint knew that his strange instinct had once again proved wiser than reason, and that he was not wasting his time.
She was half an hour late in the morning, but went far beyond perfunctory apologies when she finally came downstairs.
"I'm sure you'll think I'm always like this, and I don't blame you. But Saville promised to call me, and he overslept. I was furious. I think there's nothing more insulting to people than to make them wait for you. Who was it who said that 'Punctuality is the politeness of princes'?"
"I like the thought," Simon said. "Who was it?"
"I don't know. I wish I did."
"That makes me feel better already. Now I won't be quite so much in awe of your historical knowledge."
"Honestly, it's not as frightening as Saville tries to make out." She held up the Michelin volume on Provence. "I just read the guide books, like you."
"All right," he said amiably, as he settled himself beside her at the wheel of his car, and opened a road map. "You name it, and I'll find it."
It was a busy morning. In spite of their belated start, they were able to walk the full circuit of the Promenade du Rocher around the Palace of the Popes in Avignon, enjoying its panoramas of the town and countryside and the immortal bridge which still goes only halfway across the Rhône, before taking the hour-long guided tour of the Palace itself, which the Saint found anticlimactically dull, having no temperament for that sort of historical study. He endured the education with good grace, but was glad of the release when he could drive her over the modern highway across the river, a few kilometers out to the less pretentious cousin-town of Villeneuve-les-Avignon, for lunch at the Prieuré.
It was not that she had made the sightseeing any more painful for him, than it had to be — in fact, she had displayed an irreverence towards the more pompous exhibits which had encouraged his own iconoclastic sense of humor — but the bones of the past would never be able to compete for his interest with the flesh of the present, even when it was as excessive as Rowena Flane's.
The shaded garden restaurant was quiet and peaceful; and a Pernod and water with plenty of ice tinkling in the glass was simultaneously refreshing to the eye, the hand, the palate, and the soul.
"Of all civilized blessings," he remarked, "I think ice would be one of the hardest to give up. And you must admit that it improves even historical epics when you can watch them in an air-conditioned theater, and enjoy the poor extras sweating up the Pyramids while you sit and wish you'd worn a sweater."
"The Roman emperors had ice," she said. "They had it brought down from the Alps."
"So I've heard. A slave runner set out with a two-hundred-pound chunk, and arrived at the palace with an ice cube. I guess it was just as good as a Frigidaire if you were in the right set. But who daydreams about being a slave?"
"Unless she catches the eye of the handsome hero."
"I know," said the Saint. "The kind of part your father used to play so well."
He saw her stiffen, and the careless gaiety drained down from her eyes.
"Was anything wrong with that?" she challenged coldly.
"Nothing," he said disarmingly. "It was a job, and he did it damned well."
The head waiter came then, and they ordered the crêpes du Prieuré, the delicately stuffed rolled pancakes which he remembered from a past visit, and to follow them a gigot à la broche aux herbes de Provence which he knew could not fail them, with a bottle of Ste Roseline rosé to counter the warmth of the day.
But after that interruption, she stubbornly refused its opportunity to change the subject.