He swung back to face Bill Holbrook.
“I’m afraid,” he said softly, but with the iron will showing through his velvet tones, “that we must have some truth in our little séance. Like the walrus, I feel the time has come to speak of many things. From this moment, you are my prisoners. The length of your durance vile depends on you. Who are you, Miss Winter?”
The look she turned on him made his hands tingle. Hers was a face for cupping between tender palms. Dark and troubled, her eyes pleaded for understanding, for sympathy.
“I told you all I know,” she pleaded. “I’ve tried and tried, ever since I could remember anything, to think of — well, all those things you think of at times.”
Again she passed a hand across her face, as if wiping away veils.
“I don’t ever remember snagging a stocking on the way to an important appointment,” she said. “And I know that girls do. I never had to fight for my” — she colored — “my honor, whatever that is. And I know that girls like me have fought for this something I don’t understand, by the time they’ve reached my age. Whatever that is,” she added pensively. “I don’t even know how old I am, or where I’ve been.”
A pattern suddenly clicked into place in the Saint’s brain, a pattern so monstrous, so inhuman as to arouse his destructive instincts to the point of homicidal mania. The look he turned on Big Bill Holbrook was ice and flame.
His voice was pitched at conversational level, but each word fell from his lips like a shining sword.
“Do you know,” he said, “I’m beginning to get some new ideas. Not very nice ideas, chum. And if I’m guessing right about what you and your fellow scum have done to this innocent girl, you are liable to cost your insurance company money.”
He moved toward Holbrook with a liquid grace that had all the co-ordination of a panther’s movement — and the menace. Big Bill Holbrook leaned back from it.