A voice said: "Lady Valerie? May we come in?"
She stammered something and stepped back. The Saint felt the edge of the bed against his knees and sat down quickly on it. The door, closing again, disclosed him to the arrivals at the same time as it revealed them to him. They were the police sergeant whom he had met before, in plain clothes, and the constable whose name was Reginald.
4
Whereupon quite a number of interesting jobs of looking proceeded to take place in various directions.
The Saint looked at the two arms of the law, and his face broke into an affable and untroubled smile of welcome. He took his right hand out of the breast of his coat with his cigarette case in it.
The constable looked at the Saint, and his mouth sagged open. He said in a dazed and dumbfounded sort of voice: "Gorblimey, it's 'im." Then he went on staring, while his honest red face expressed an inward struggle between admiration and duty.
The sergeant looked at the Saint and stiffened. He looked slightly frightened, but his uneasiness was clearly subservient to his sense of responsibility. He planted himself more firmly on his by-no-means-ethereal feet, as if bracing himself to deal with trouble.
Then another thought seemed to cross his mind, distracting him. He tried to resist it, but it grew stronger. He frowned. He looked at Lady Valerie again, rather perplexedly.
Lady Valerie looked at him and twitched a rather weak and uncertain little smile. Then she looked at the Saint.
The Saint looked at her. His face was cheerfully composed, but his eyes said again, for her alone, the same things that they had said when the two of them had looked at one another before he told her to open the door. It was as if they met her with a challenge, a suggestion, a request, a mocking invitation, a sardonic query, anything but a plea; and yet no other eyes on earth could have pleaded more compellingly. And now she understood some things that she had not understood before.