"Because it makes you look like an old hag."
She sniffed.
"Well, that's your fault," she said; but she stopped crying. She twisted her head down and hunched up one shoulder and wriggled comically, trying to dry the tears on her blouse. She drew a long shuddering sigh like a baby. She said: "All right, why don't you talk to me about something and take my mind off it? What were you getting so excited about when the car turned over?"
The Saint gazed past her, into one of the corners where the dusk was rapidly deepening. That memory had been the first to return to his mind when he painfully recovered consciousness, had haunted him ever since under the surface of his unconcern, embittering the knowledge of his own helplessness.
"The Reichstag," he said. "Remember the Reichstag. That's what Kennet wrote on that bit of paper, which he probably pinched from the headquarters of the Sons of France when he was a member. That's why he had to be cooled off. He knew one thing too much, among a lot of stuff that didn't matter, and if he'd lived that one thing might have wrecked the whole scheme."
"But what did he know?"
"Do you remember the Reichstag fire, in Berlin? That was the thing that started the Nazi tyranny in Germany. Of course the Nazis said that the Communists had done it; but a good many people have always believed that the Nazis arranged it themselves, to give themselves a grand excuse for what they went on to do afterwards. It seems pretty plain that the Sons of France have planned something on the same lines for tomorrow. That piece of paper was a list of various suitable occasions for a blowup of that sort which had been jotted down and discussed and eliminated for various reasons until just one was left — the opening of the Hostel of Memory at Neuilly by Comrade Chaulage. The scheme will be to have Comrade Chaulage assassinated during the proceedings. This of course will be the work of the Communists, like the Reichstag fire; and it will not only be proof of what desperate and disgusting people they are, but it will also be evidence of their contempt for the Heroes of France, which is always a very strong point with the Fascist gang. The Sons of France will claim the assassination as a crowning example of the incompetence of the present government to keep the Red bandits in check; so they will mobilize their forces, seize the government and proclaim a dictatorship. And there you are."
"You mean the Sons of France are going to kill Chaulage," she said, "and Luker and Algy and General Sangore know all about it."
"That was my guess. And I still like it."
She seemed a little disappointed, as if she had expected something more sensational than that. Her brief silence seemed to argue that after all there were millions of Frenchmen, and one more or less couldn't matter so much as that.