Prelude for War (45 page)

“What hard-earned
money?”

“The money from my
memoirs,” she said simply. “You
see,
I thought it would be a good idea to write my memoirs
and
sell them to one of the Sunday papers. They’d have
been
awfully thrilling, with all about you and Luker and
Algy
and everybody and all our adventures, and I thought
they’d
be a great success. I told Algy about it, and he
thought
so, too. In fact, he offered to buy them from me
himself.”

“Oh, did he?”
said the Saint. “And how much did he
give
you for them?”

“He’s given me ten
thousand so far,” she said artlessly,
“but
I expect he’ll give me quite a generous wedding present
as well. It’s saved me a lot of trouble, too, because he
doesn’t actually want me to write them just yet, and I must
say I wasn’t looking forward to that because my
spelling
is lousy.”

For several moments the
Saint glared at her speechlessly.

“Damn you, young
woman,” he exploded. “Do you
realize
that Algy was my only chance of collecting any
boodle
out of this party? And after all I’ve done for you, y
ou
have the nerve to step in and knock him off under my
nose!”

“I don’t know about
that,” she said diffidently. “After
all,
I did find him first.”

Simon Templar surrendered. He lay back and
laughed
helplessly.

“You win,” he
said. “You know, I’m beginning to think
that Luker and Marteau
and company made a pretty clean
getaway
after all. If they’d been left at large, they’d prob
ably have found
that they’d fallen into the arms of a mon
ster
that would have made them suffer a lot more. Algy
is the really unlucky guy.”

She lowered her eyes demurely.

“If by a monster you
mean me, I can tell you that there
are quite a lot of
men who wouldn’t consider themselves
a bit unlucky to
fall into my arms.”

“The trouble
is,” said the Saint, “I’m afraid I could
almost
be one of them.”

AU REVOIR

WATCH FOR
THE SIGN OF THE SAINT

HE WILL BE BACK!