"I shall get my face smacked," the Saint took her up swiftly. "And quite right, too. Try to forgive me. I never could see an elastic leg without being irresistibly impelled to find out how far it would stretch."
He cast a reproachful glance at Carn which made the detective take on an even deeper purple hue. Then he was smiling at Patricia with a message that was not for broadcasting. It showed his complete satisfaction with the way things had fallen out. There must have been a difference of a couple of minutes between their watches, and those two minutes had been just long enough to save the beans from being spilled all over the place. And the smile added: "Well played, kid! I knew I could rely on you. And everything in the garden's lovely.. .. Which means, incidentally, that it's our job to lead Carn up the garden. Watch your step!" And the girl smiled back, to show that she understood — but there was rather more in her smile than that. It showed that she was very glad to see him again, and the Saint had a struggle to stop himself grabbing her up in his arms and kissing her on the strength of it.
"You seem to have been in the wars, Mr. Templar," remarked Carn, and the Saint nodded tolerantly.
"Didn't Miss Holm tell you?" "1 didn't feel I could ask her."
The Saint raised his eyebrows, for although the girl had made some effort to tidy herself it was still glaringly evident that she had not spent the evening playing dominoes in the drawing room. Carn explained.
"When I opened the door and saw her, I thought something had happened and she was coming to me for — er — first aid. But she said it was only for a 1 chat, so I overcame my — 'um — professional instincts, and said nothing. I rather think you were leading up to something when Mr. Templar came ' in, weren't you, Miss Holm? ... I see that you A were. But as a — er — um — ah — " Carn caught the I Saint's accusing eye for the third time, and spluttered. "As a doctor," said Carn defiantly, "I was trained to let my patients make the running. The old school, but a good one. And then you arrive-”
The detective broke off with a gesture that comprehended Patricia's ragamuffin appearance and the Saint's own tattered clothes, and Simon grinned.
"So sad!" he drawled. "And now I suppose you'll be in agonies of curiosity for weeks."
Carn shrugged.
"That depends."
The detective was a passably good actor, but he was heavily handicapped by the suggestion of malicious glee that lurked in the Saint's twinkling eyes. And he dared not seem to notice that the Saint was quietly laughing at him because it was essential for him to maintain the role of Dr. Carn in the presence of a witness. Which goes some way to explain why his florid face remained more rubicund even. than it normally was, and why there was a certain unnatural restraint in his voice.
Patricia was perplexed. She had expected to find that the Saint and Carn were familiar friends: instead, she found two men fencing with innuendo. It was beyond her to follow the subtleties of the duel, but there was no doubt that Simon was quite happy and Carn was quite annoyed, for it was indisputably the Saint's game.
"Shall I tell you all about it, Doc?" asked the Saint insinuatingly, for it was a weakness of his to exaggerate his pose to the borders of farce.
"Do," urged Carn, in an unguarded moment.
'Til tell you," said Simon confidentially. "It was like this. ..."
Carn drew nearer. The Saint frowned, blinked, scratched his head, and stared blankly at the detective.
"Do you know," said Simon, in simulated dismay, "it's a most extraordinary thing — I can't remember. Isn't that funny?"
The detective was understood to reply that he |was not amused. He said other things, in a low voice that was none the less pregnant with emotion, for the Saint's ears alone, and Simon turned away with a pained expression.
“I don't agree," said Simon. "The Ten-Toed Tripe-Hopper is nothing like the Wall-Eyed 'Giraffe. Try Keating's."
"As a matter of fact," interposed Patricia, who felt that things looked like getting out of hand, “Mr. Templar's been with me most of the evening. We were taking a walk along by the cliff, and — " Simon raised his hand.
"Hush!" he said. "Not before the Doc. You'll be -putting ideas into his head."
"Grrrr," said Carn fiercely, which a man might well say when goaded to the limits of human endurance, and then he coughed energetically to cover it up.
"You see?" said the Saint. "You're embarrassing him."
Simon was perfect. His Smiling, polished ease made Carn's red-faced discomfort look like an intentional effort of the detective to entertain a children's party with a few "faces" between the ice creams and the Punch and Judy, and Patricia was weak with suppressed laughter. It was unpardonable, of course, but it was the only way to dispose of Carn's burning curiosity. To have been secretive and mysterious, much as the Saint would have loved playing the part, would have been fatal.
Carn suddenly realized that he was being futile — that the elasticity of his leg was being sorely tried. The Saint had been watching for that, and instantly he became genuinely apologetic.
"Perhaps I ragged you a bit too much," he hastened to confess. "Really, though, you were asking for it, by being so infernally suspicious. Almost as if you suspected me of just having murdered somebody, or robbing the till of the village post office. It's really quite simple. Miss Holm and I were walking along the cliffs, and — "
"I fell over," Patricia explained, jumping in as soon as the Saint hesitated. "I landed on a ledge, and I wasn't seriously hurt, but Mr. Templar had an awful job getting me back.”
Carn frowned. He had been badly had. The Saint's merciless leg pulling had achieved its object. So masterly was the transition from teasing to sober seriousness that the seriousness went unquestioned, and Carn swallowed whole a story that he would certainly have disbelieved if it had been told him in the first place without any nonsense.
"No offence, old thing," pleaded the Saint contritely. "I couldn't miss such a marvellous opportunity to make you imagine the worst."
Carn looked from one to the other; but Patricia, pulling her weight and more also, met the detective's searching stare unabashed, and the Saint's face displayed exactly what the Saint wanted it to display.
"I tried to tell you once," Patricia pointed out, "only Mr. Templar interrupted."
Simon flashed her a boatload of appreciation in a glance. Ye gods! What a girl! There wasn't an actress in the world who could have taught her anything about the kind of acting that gets over without any stage effects — she had every woman in every Secret Service in Europe skun a mile. There she was, cool as you please, playing up to her cue like an old hand. And, marvel of marvels, asking no questions. The Saint hadn't the foggiest notion why a girl he'd known only a couple of days should back him up like that, when every flag on the mast would have told any ordinary person that the Saint was more likely to be wrong than not. Ordinary respectable people did not go in for the hobbies that she had seen the Saint indulging in — like bending statuettes over millionaire knight's skulls after walking mysteriously out of the night through their library windows, or being chased round gardens by men and bloodhounds, or chucking their lady friends over eight-foot walls. And yet she trusted him implicitly, took her line from him, and postponed the questions till afterward! And not the least remarkable fact was that the Saint, that consummate egotist, never thought of the obvious explanation. ...
Carn reddened again, recovered his normal colour, and his stolid features gradually lost their strained appearance and relaxed into a wry smile.
"You certainly did try to save me, Miss Holm," he admitted. "You see, the Saint — that is, Mr. Templar — he's always running into trouble, and seeing him like that I couldn't help thinking of his habits. It didn't occur to me that you were with him — I was so dense it didn't strike me that you might have got mussed up at the same time as he did — and, of course, I know all about you, Miss Holm, so — "