A kind of communal gasp like a sigh of wind swept over the assembly, as if the final unarguable physical disappearance of their property had squeezed the last long-held breath out of their bodies. Every eye had been riveted on it in its last journey through their midst, every eye had blinked to the shock of its ultimate vanishment, and then every eye dragged itself dazedly back to the platform from which those catastrophes had been dictated.
Almost to their surprise, the Saint was still standing there. But his other gun had disappeared and he had taken his mask off. In some way, the aura of subtle command that had clung to him before in spite of his easy casualness had gone, leaving the easy casualness alone. He was still smiling.
For an instant the two bodyguards were paralyzed. And then with muffled choking noises they made a concerted dive for their guns.
The Saint made no move except a slight deprecating motion of the hand that held his cigarette.
"Ladies and gentlemen," he said into the microphone, "I must now make my apologies, and an explanation."
The bodyguards straightened up, with their guns held ready. And yet something in his quiet voice, unarmed as he was, gripped them in spite of themselves, as it had gripped everyone else in the room. They looked questioningly towards the countess.
She gave them no response. She was rigid, watching the Saint with the first icy grasp of an impossible premonition closing in on her.
Somehow the Saint was going to get away with it. She knew it with a horrible certainty, even while she was wildly trying to guess what he would say. He could never have been so insane as to believe that he could pull a public holdup like that without being arrested an hour after he left the hotel, unless he had had some trick up his sleeve to immobilize the hue and cry. And she knew that she was now going to hear the trick she had not thought of.
"You have just been the victims of a holdup," he was saying. "Probably to nearly all of you that was a novel experience. But it is something that might happen to any of you tonight, tomorrow, at any time — so long as there are men at large to whom that seems like the best way of making a living.
"You came here tonight to help the National League for the Care of Incurables. That is a good and humane work. But I have taken this opportunity — with the kind co-operation of Countess Jannowicz — to make you think of another equally good, perhaps even more constructive work: the Care of Curables.