Simon locked the door and stood with his back to it.
"Darling," he said reproachfully, but with the lilt of rapture still playing havoc with the evenness of his voice, "what was the matter with our hospitality?"
2
The room was one of those quaint dormitoryes which have always made the English country hotel so attractive to discriminating travellers. It was principally furnished with a gigantic imitation-oak wardrobe; an imitation mahogany dressing table with a tilting mirror; a black-enamelled iron bedstead with brass knobs on it; and a marble-topped washstand bearing a china basin with a china jug standing in it, a soap dish with no soap and a vase for toothbrushes. Under the marble slab were cupboard doors concealing unmentionable utensils, and under them stood a large china slop pail. The pattern on the wallpaper had apparently been designed to depict one of the wilder horticultural experiments of Mr Luther Burbank, in which purple tulips grew on the central stems of bright green cabbages, the whole crop being tied together with trailing coils and bows of pink and blue ribbon. The dimensions of the room were so cunningly contrived that a slender person of normal agility could, with the exercise of reasonable care, just manage to find a path between them without having to bark his shins or stub his toes on any particular piece of furniture. Even so, there was no more than barely sufficient room to contain the chintz-covered armchair in which Lady Valerie was sitting and behind which she had unsuccessfully tried to stuff away the sheaf of papers that she had been perusing when the Saint came in.
Simon's satiric eye rested on the ends of documents that still protruded.
"If you'd told us you wanted something to read," he said, "we could have lent you some good books."
He leaned against the door, clothed in magnificent assurance, as if he had been conversationally breaking the ice with an old friend from whom he was sure to receive a cordial welcome.
He got it. The stunned astonishment dissolved out of her face and a broad schoolgirlish grin spread over her mouth.
"Well, I'm damned!" she said. "Aren't you marvellous? How on earth did you know I was here?"
He grinned in return. After all that he had been through to find her he couldn't help it.