But he did not tell them what it was, for at this point a fresh authoritative voice interrupted the debate with a curt "Make way, please," and the crowd opened to let through the burly figure of a detective-sergeant in plain clothes. Simon looked round, and saw that he had posted a constable at the door as he came in. The sergeant scanned the faces of the group, and addressed Mrs. Dempster-Craven.
"What's the trouble?"
"My pendant --"
She was helped out by a chorus of bystanders whose information, taken in the mass, was somewhat confusing. The sergeant sorted it out phlegmatically; and at the end he shrugged.
"Since these gentlemen are all accusing each other, I take it you don't wish to make any particular charges?"
"I cannot accuse my guests of being thieves," said Mrs. Dempster-Craven imperially. "I only want my diamond."
The sergeant nodded. He had spent twelve years in C Division, and had learned that Berkeley Square is a region where even policemen have to be tactful.
"In that case," he said, "I think it would help us if the gentlemen agreed to be searched."
The Saint straightened up.
It had been a good evening; and he had no regrets. The game was worth playing for its own sake, to him: the prizes came welcomely, but they weren't everything. And no one knew better than he that you couldn't win all the time. There were chances that couldn't be reckoned with in advance; and the duplicity of Mr. Watkins was one of those. But for that, he would have played his hand faultlessly, out-bluffed and outmanoeuvred the Carney-Runce combination in a fair field, and made as clean a job of it as anything else he had done. But that single unexpected factor had turned the scale just enough to bring the bluff to a showdown, as unexpected factors always would. And yet Peter Quentin saw the Saint was smiling.
"I think that's a good idea," said the Saint.
Between Philip Carney and George Runce flashed one blank glance; but their mouths remained closed.
"Perhaps there's another room we could go to," said the sergeant, almost genially; and Mrs. Dempster-Craven inclined her head like a queen dismissing a distasteful odour.
"Watkins will show you to the library."
Simon turned on his heel and led the way towards the door, with Mr. Watkins still gripping his arms; but as his path brought him level with Kate Allfield he stopped and smiled down at her.
"I think you're a great gal."
His voice sounded a trifle strange. And then, before two hundred shocked and startled eyes, including those of Lord and Lady Bredon, the Honourable Celia Mallard, three baronets, and the aspiring Mrs. Dempster-Craven herself, he laid his hands gently on her shoulders and kissed her outrageously on the mouth; and in the silence of appalled aristocracy which followed that performance made his stately exit.
"How the devil did you get away with it?" asked Peter Quentin weakly, as they drove away in a taxi an hour later. "I was fairly sweating blood all the time you were being stripped."
The Saint's face showed up in the dull glow as he drew at his cigarette.
"It was in my mouth," he said.
"But they made you open your mouth --"
"It was there when I kissed Kate, anyway," said the Saint, and sang to himself all the rest of the way home.
The Green Goods Man
"THE secret of contentment," said Simon Templar oratorically, "is to take things as they come. As is the daily office-work of the City hog in his top hat to the moments when he signs his supreme mergers, so are the bread-and-butter exploits of a pirate to his great adventures. After all, one can't always be ploughing through thrilling escapes and captures with guns popping in all directions; but there are always people who'll give you money. You don't even have to look for them. You just put on a monocle and the right expression of half-witted-ness, and they come up and tip their purses into your lap."
He offered this pearl of thought for the approval of his usual audience; and it is a regrettable fact that neither of them disputed his philosophy. Patricia Holm knew him too well; and even Peter Quentin had by that time walked in the ways of Saintly lawlessness long enough to know that such pronouncements inevitably heralded another of the bread-and-butter exploits referred to. It wasn't, of course, strictly true that Simon Templar was in need of bread and butter; but he liked jam with it, and a generous world had always provided him abundantly with both.
