He poured out the last of the wine, and took up his glass. Over the rim of it his clear blue eyes raked the girl with a cavalier challenge that matched his devil-may-care smile and the mocking slant of his brows. His face was alight suddenly.
“I don’t propose to forget, Judith,” he said. “I am the Saint, and the safe hasn’t been made that I can’t open. Nor has anything else been thought of that I can’t do. We’ll go to Westmount together!”
“This is the place,” said the girl.
Simon switched off the engine and let the car coast to a stop under the lee of the hedge. It was her car — she had been prepared for that. She had telephoned from the restaurant and it had been fueled and waiting for them at the garage.
Burt Northwade’s home, an unwieldy mansion in the Napoleonic style, stood on a slight rise of ground some distance back from the road, in the center of its extensive and pleasant grounds.
Rising to sit on the door of the convertible, with one foot on the seat, Simon could see the solid rectangle of its upper part painted in dull black on a smudged gray-blue sky. He felt that he knew every corner of it as if he had lived there for years, from the descriptions she had given him and the rough plans she had drawn on the back of the menu, familiarizing him with the configurations of rooms and corridors while their coffee grew cold and neither of them cared. That had been a time of delight shared in adventure which he would always like to remember, but now it was over, and the adventure went on.
It was a night without moon or stars, and yet not utterly dark; perfect for the purpose. She saw the clean-cut lines of his face, recklessly etched in the burst of light as he kindled a cigarette.
“I still don’t know why you should do this for me,” she said.
“Because it’s a game after my own heart,” he answered. “Northwade is a bird I’ve had ideas of my own about for some time. And as for our present object — well, no one could have thought of a story that would have been more likely to fetch me a thousand miles to see it through.”
“I feel I ought to be coming with you.”