"Maybe not so tame," he corrected himself. "And what would your fee be for dining with a gent if it meant earning Comrade Fairweather's disapproval? For instance, what about having dinner with me on Thursday?"
She didn't answer for a moment. She sat looking downwards, swinging her leg idly, apparently absorbed in the movement of her foot.
Then she looked up at him and smiled.
"You've fallen for me in quite a big way, haven't you?" she said a little ironically. "I mean, inviting me to dinner and offering to pay me for it."
"I fell passionately in love with you the moment I saw you," Simon declared shamelessly.
She nodded.
"I know. I couldn't help noticing the eager way you dashed off this morning when you thought you'd got all the information you could out of me. I mean, it was all too terribly romantic for anything."
"The audience made me bashful," said the Saint. "Now if we'd only been alone—"
Her dark eyes were mocking.
"Well," she said, "I don't mean that I couldn't put up with having dinner with you if you paid me for it. After all, I've got to have dinner somewhere, and I've been out with a lot of people who weren't nearly so good looking as you are even if they weren't nearly so bashful either. Algy used to pay me twenty guineas for entertaining his important clients."