"Which isn't impossible either," she said demurely.
Simon frowned.
"You forget my Saintly reputation. But still, maybe to Vogel, with his low criminal mind, it isn't impossible either. But it's still unusual enough to be worth looking at. And then there's you."
"Without a reputation."
"And not deserving one. You've been making a clear set at him for several days—weeks—whatever it is. That again may not be impossible. It might be his money, or his beauty, or because he sings so nicely in his bath. But if it isn't even unusual, if I were in his place I'd think it was—interesting. Interesting enough, maybe, to try and find out some more about you."
She pressed his hand—she had been letting it rest in his all that time, as if she hadn't noticed.
"Dear man," she said, "don't you think I know all this?"
"And if he only wants to see exactly where you stand in the game?"
"I can pack a gun."
"Like any other ordinary innocent woman."
"Then I'll go without it."
"You wouldn't be much worse off."
"All the same, I'll go."
"Three," he quoted her, "didn't come back."
She nodded. The impish humour still played on her lips and the surface of her eyes, but the depths behind it were clear and still.
"When you join Ingerbeck's, you don't sign on for a cocktail party. You join an army. You take an oath—to do your job, to keep your mouth shut, and to take the consequences. Wouldn't you go?"
"Yes. But there are special risks."
"For a poor defenceless girl?"
"They call it Worse than Death."
"I've never believed it."
He sat up and stared thoughtfully over the water. There was a quality of lightness in her decision that ended argument more finally than any dramatic protestations. She would go; because whatever the risk might be, it was not fact. It was her job to find out, not to guess.
"I take it you've already accepted," he said wryly.
"The messenger was going to call back for my answer. I left a letter when I came out. I said I'd be delighted. Maybe Kurt Vogel isn't so bad as he's painted," she said dreamily. "He left some lovely flowers with the invitation."
"I shouldn't be surprised if you fell for him."
"I might."
"But now and then your conscience would prick you. When you were riding around in your Rolls, half strangled with diamonds, the memory of lost love would haunt you. I can see you stifling a sob, and pressing a penny into a poor beggar's hand before you hurry on, because he reminds you of me."
"Don't say it," she pleaded tremulously. "I can't bear it. How was I to know you cared like that?"
The Saint scratched his head.
"I must have forgotten to tell you," he admitted. "Never mind." He turned to her with cavalier blue eyes sobered to a thoughtful directness that she had seen before. "But does it leave me out?"
"I don't know," she said steadily. "Have you decided to break off your holiday?"
"Let's have a drink and talk about it."
She shook her head.
"I can't risk it. Vogel may be ashore now—he may be anywhere. I've risked enough to talk to you at all. If you've changed your mind since last night, we'll fight over it."
"Did I tell you I'd made up my mind?" Simon inquired mildly.
"You let me think you had. I took a chance when I told you the story. I wanted you to know. I still do." She was facing him without banter now, cool and possessed and momentarily unpossessable, and yet with a shadow of wistfulness deepening in her gaze. "I think Ingerbeck himself would have done the same. We might get a long way together; and if we came through there'd be plenty of commission to split. Just once, it might be fun for you to look at a dotted line."
His eyebrows slanted quizzically.
"Otherwise?"
"I suppose we can still be hung out to dry."
She stood up, dusting the sand from her robe. Simon picked himself up after her, and the grey eyes came back to his face.
"Where should we meet on this—dotted line?" he asked resignedly.
"I'll be here to-morrow. No, not here—we can't take this risk again. Suppose I swam out and met you, off the Pointe du Moulinet. Halfway house. At eleven." She smiled, as he had seen her smile once before. "Are you looking for your pen?"
"I can't write, Loretta."
"You can make a cross."
"You know what that stands for?"
"If it does," she said, "you signed last night."
He watched her walking up towards the white spires of the Casino Balneum, with all the maddening delight of movement in the swing of her brown body, and searched his vocabulary for words to describe the capriciousness of fortune. Admitted that all the gifts of that immoral goddess had strings harnessed to them—there were strings and strings. There was no real need in adventure for quite such a disturbing complication. And the Saint smiled in spite of that. The beach was empty after she had left it; that is to say, there were about a thousand other people on the Plage de l'Ecluse, but he found all of them sickeningly bovine. Including the Parisian vamp, who by this time was enjoying the devotion of three muscle-conscious young men, the debauched Roman emperor, and a hungry-looking tourist from Egg Harbor, New Jersey, who should have been old enough to know better.
Simon turned away from the repulsive spectacle, and was rewarded by the almost equally unwelcome vision of Orace's moustache, through which something more than the sea air was filtering.
"You do break out at the most unromantic moments, Orace," he complained; and then he saw that Orace's eyes were still fixed glassily on the middle distance.
"Is that the lidy, sir?"
Orace's martial voice was hushed with a sort of awe; and the Saint frowned.
"She isn't a lady," he said firmly. "No lady would use such shameless eyes to try and seduce a self-respecting buccaneer from his duty. No lady would take such a mean advantage of a human being." He perceived that his audience was still scarcely following him, and looked round. "Nor is that the wench I'm talking about, anyway. Come on away—you'll be getting off in a minute."
They walked over the sand towards the bend by the swimming pool, where the Promenade des Alliés curves out towards the sea.
"If you arsk me," Orace remarked, recalling the grievance which had been temporarily smoothed over by his anatomical studies, "these Frogs are all barmy. First thing I arsks for petrol, an' they give me paraffin. Then when I says that ain't what I want, they tell me they've got some stuff called essence, wot's just as good. I 'as a smell of this stuff, an' blimey if it ain't petrol. 'Ow the thunderinell can they 'elp goin' barmy wiv a langwidge like that?"
"I don't suppose they can help it," said the Saint gravely. "Did you buy some of this essence?"
"Yessir. Then I tried to get some ice. They 'adn't got no ice, but they tried to sell me some glass. I gave it up an' brought the dinghy rahnd in case yer didn't wanter swim back. Barmy?" said Orace sizzlingly.
It was nearly one o'clock when the fuel tanks had been replenished from the cans which Orace had acquired at the cost of so much righteous indignation, and the Saint had cleaned himself up and put a comb through his hair. Orace produced a drink —freshened, in spite of gloomy prophecies, with ice—and required to know whether he should get lunch.
"I don't know," said the Saint, with unusual brusqueness.
He had no idea what he wanted to do. He felt suddenly restless and dissatisfied. The day had gone flat in prospect. They might have lazed through the long afternoon, steeping themselves in sunlight and romping through the light play of words. They might have plunged together through the cool rapture of the sea, or drifted out under spread sails to explore the Ile de Cézembre and picnic under the cliffs of St Lunaire. They might have enjoyed any of a dozen trivial things which he had half planned in his imagination, secure in a communion of pagan understanding that made no demands and asked no promises. Instead of . which . . .