"I'll try not to," she said lightly.

"You don't believe me," accused Templar sternly.

She hesitated.

"Well — "

"One day," said the Saint severely, "you will apologize for your unbelief.”

He gave her a stiff bow and marched away so abruptly that she gasped.

It was exactly one o'clock when he arrived home at the Pill Box, and Orace was flustered and disapproving.

"If ya' 'adn't bin 'ome punctual," said Orace, "I'd 'a' bin out looking fer yer corpse. It ain't fair ter give a man such a lotta worry. Yer so careless I wonder the Tiger 'asn't putcha out 'arf a dozen times."

"I've met the most wonderful girl in the world," said Simon impenitently. "By all the laws of adventure, I'm bound to have to save her life two or three times during the next ten days. I shall kiss her very passionately in the last chapter. We shall be married — "

Orace snorted.

"Lunch 'narf a minnit," he said, and disappeared.

The Saint washed his hands and ran a comb through his hair in the half-minute's grace allowed him; and the Saint was thoughtful. He had his full measure of human vanity, and it tickled his sense of humour to enter the lists with the air of a Mystery Man straight out of a detective story, but he had a solid reason for giving his caprice its head. It struck him that the Tiger knew all about him and that therefore no useful purpose would be served by trying to pretend innocence; whereas a shameless bravado might well bother the other side considerably. They would be racking their brains to find some reason for his brazen front, and crediting him with the most complicated subtleties: when all the time there was nothing behind it but the fact that one pose was as good as another, and the opportunity to play the swashbuckler was too good to be missed. !