but when she stole a look at the Saint to see how he had taken the snub she saw that beneath his dutifully decorous demeanour he was shaking with silent laughter, and she was furious.

The Saint had travelled. He talked interestingly — if with a strong egotistical bias — about places as far removed from civilization and from each other as Vladivostok, Armenia, Moscow, Lapland, Chungking, Pernambuco, and Sierra Leone. There seemed to be few of the wilder parts of the world which he had not visited, and few of those in which he had not had adventures. He had won a gold rush in South Africa and lost his holding in a poker game twenty-four hours later. He had run guns into China, whisky into the United States, and perfume into England. He had deserted after a year in the Spanish Foreign Legion. He had worked his passage across the Atlantic as a steward, tramped across America, fought his way across Mexico during a free-for-all revolution, picked up a couple of thousand pounds in the Argentine, and sailed home from Buenos Aires in a millionaire's suite — to lose nearly all the fruit of his wanderings on Epsom Downs.

"You'll find Baycombe very dull after such an exciting life," said Miss Girton.

"Somehow, I don't agree," said the Saint. I findthe air very bracing."

Bloem adjusted his spectacles and inquired:

"And what might your employment be at the moment?"

"Just now," said the Saint suavely, "I'm looking for a million dollars. I feel that I should like to end my days in luxury, and I can't get along on less than fifteen thousand a year."

Algy squawked with merriment.

"Haw-haw!" he yapped. "Jolly good! Too awfully horribly priceless! What? What?"

"Quite," the Saint concurred modestly.

"I fear," said Lapping, "that you will hardly find your million dollars in Bayeombe."

The Saint put his hands on the tablecloth and studied his fingernails with a gentle smile.