He stood over Calvin Gray, poised and quiet and kindly implacable.
"This is your problem, not mine," he said.
The girl sat beside her father again and held his hand.
"You mustn't think about me," she said. "You mustn't."
"How can I help it?"
"If you were both tortured to death," said the Saint inexorably, "what good would it do?"
Calvin Gray covered his eyes.
"Devan talked to me all afternoon," he said hoarsely. "He told me… If it was only myself, I could try… But Madeline. I'm not big enough… And what good would it do? What difference would it make? They'll kill the invention anyway. So why should…" His voice broke, and then rose suddenly. "I couldn't see it. Don't you understand? I couldn't!"
"Daddy," said the girl.
The Saint watched for an instant, and then turned away.
On one of the side shelves, beside the playing cards, there was a score pad and a pencil. He picked them up. At the top of the first sheet he printed in bold capitals: WE MAY BE OVERHEARD. Then under that he wrote a few quick lines. He tore off the sheet and put the pad and pencil back.
Then he returned to Calvin Gray and put a hand on his shoulder, and the old man looked up at him hollow-eyed.
"Crying won't get you anywhere. This is still a war," said the Saint, and handed him the paper he had written on.
The girl tried to lean over and see; but Simon took her arm and brought her up to her feet and led her a few steps away. He held her by both elbows, facing him, and gazed at her with all the strength that was in him.
"Some of this is my fault too," he said. "If I hadn't butted in, it might not have been so bad."
Then the door opened, and Walter Devan came in.
He looked like a sales manager who had left a conference room at a crucial moment to answer a phone call.
"Well?" he inquired briskly.
The Saint detached himself leisuredly, and lighted another cigarette.
"So far as I'm concerned," he said, without a flicker of emotion, "the answer is stilclass="underline" Nuts."
"So is mine," said the girl clearly.
"I'm sorry," said Devan; and it sounded like genuine regret.
But he looked at Calvin Gray.
Gray got up off the divan. He was unsteady and haggard, and his eyes burned.
"Mine isn't," he said. "Can you swear to me that if I do everything you want, nothing will ever happen to Madeline?"
"Daddy!" said the girl.
"I can," said Devan.
The old man's hands twisted together.
"Then — I will."
Devan studied him, not with cheap triumph, but with sturdy businesslike satisfaction.
"I'll get you some paper to write out your process," he said, in quite a friendly way. "Is there anything else you'd like?"
Gray shook his head.
"I couldn't write it. It would sound so complicated, and — I don't even know if I could concentrate enough… Please… Can't you make it easy? Mr. Quennel used to be a chemist himself, didn't he? Take me back to my laboratory, I'll show him—"
"Daddy," said the girl in torment.
"I'll show him," Gray said in a kind of hysterical breathlessness. "He'll understand. And he'll have it all to himself. Nothing in writing. Him and me… and nobody'll ever know… and Madeline… You promise?"
"Come back to the house and talk to Mr. Quennel yourself," Devan said reasonably.
He took Calvin Gray's arm and steered him towards the door. But he never turned his back on the Saint; and, almost paralytically, his right hand stayed with the bulge in his coat pocket where it had been from the time when he came in.
Madeline Gray tensed in a spasmic impulse to go after him; and the Saint caught her by the shoulders and held her.
The door closed again.
Simon Templar's face was like stone.
"You can't do anything," he said.
It was a moment of interminable stillness.
Then with a fierce irresistible movement, she tore herself away from him and flung herself down on the nearest divan, face downwards, her face clutched and buried between her hands. He could see her right hand, the small fingers clenched to whiteness as the knuckles gripped at her temples.
After a while he lighted another cigarette and took to strolling slowly and silently up and down the room.
It must have been about ten minutes before she turned over on her back and lay with one fist at her mouth, staring blankly up at the ceiling. And only then he thought it might be safe to speak. And even then, he stood over her and kept his voice so low that it was only just enough to brush her ears.
He said softly: "Madeline."
"He didn't have to do it," she said tonelessly. "He didn't."
He said: "Madeline, this is very probably curtains for all of us, but we don't have to go alone. I gave him a note."
"It didn't make any difference."
"I hope it did. I believe it did. I told him what to do."
She sat up with a sudden start.
"You told him — what?"
"I told him we could still do something on our way. I told him to get Quennel over to the laboratory. And then I said I was sure that while he was pretending to demonstrate his process he could put some things together that would go off all at once with a loud noise. And it wouldn't do any of us any good, but it would take Quennel along too, and probably Devan with him. And in the end that may be just as important." The Saint's voice was very light, no more than a breath between iron lips that scarcely moved. "I sent him to die, Madeline, but in the best way that any of us could do it."
She was on her feet somehow. She was holding his arms by the sleeves, making little aimless tugging movements, rocking a little in a kind of anguish of inarticulacy. Her eyes were flooding and yet her lips were parted in an unearthly sort of smile.
"You did that?" she repeated again and again; and it was as if something sang through the break in her voice. "You did that?"
He nodded.
Then the door opened, and he turned sharply.
Andrea Quennel came in.
4
She said: "Hullo."
He looked into her pale empty, eyes that still gave him nothing back, and put one hand negligently in his pocket, and said affably: "Hullo to you."
"What are you doing?"
"Rehearsing a play," he said.
"Why are you locked in here?"
He still didn't know how to take her.
"We heard that Selznick was looking for us," he said, "so we were going to be very inaccessible and make him double his offer."
"I thought there was something wrong," she said. "I've seen silly things happen to people who crossed Daddy before. I don't usually worry, because I'm not superstitious, but I was worried about you. So I watched. I saw them carry you out here. And that was even after I tried to warn you to be careful when I left the dining room."
"So you did," said the Saint slowly.
"And then later on Mr. Devan came out of here with a man I'd never seen before. Then I thought I'd have to find out what was going on; but there was still the other man at the door—"
"What other man?"
"A sort of short thick-set man. He's been here before, with another tall man. Mr. Devan said they were salesmen. But he didn't want me to come in."
"So what did you do?" The Saint found himself curiously tense.
"Well, I didn't see why I shouldn't go into our own air-raid shelter if I wanted to. So I pretended I'd lost an earring." She had been holding her right hand a little behind her, but now she let it slip into sight. It held an ordinary household hammer. "I didn't know what I might be running into, so I brought this with me. So when he was bending down hunting around, I hit him on the head with it and came in."