Patricia nodded.

"I wondered--"

"Never give tongue before you've got the bluebottle by the blunt end," said the Saint. "That's my motto. But I always believe in taking two looks at anything that seems to have slipped the least bit off the main line, and that was a case in point. Particularly with a man like Francis Lemuel. I've al ways thought he was far too respectable to be above suspicion. Now we may start to learn things."

She tried to find out how he had contrived to discover that Mr. Lemuel had been searching for a disreputable aviator; she was equally curious to know how the Saint had contrived to present himself for the job; but Simon Templar still had his own little secrets. About some of the preliminary details of his adventures he was often absurdly reticent.

"I heard about it," he said, "and a bloke I met in a pub out at Aldgate landed me on the front door, so to speak. . . . Mystery Number Two, of course, is why the aviator should have been disreputable. . . ."

He talked energetically about this problem, and left her first questions otherwise unanswered. And with that she had to be content-until, abruptly, he switched off the subject altogether, and for the rest of that day refused to talk any more about what he was pleased to call "affairs of state."

Other things happened afterwards-very shortly afterwards. A few other people entered the story, a few other threads came into it, a few diverting decorations blossomed upon it; but the foundations of the story were already laid, and it is doubtful whether any of the subsequent events herein described would have eventuated at all if Simon Templar had not chanced to catch sight of that innocent paragraph in the Evening Record. For of such material were the Saint's adventures made.