The girl opened the door and they went into the living room. The furniture there was in keeping with what anyone would have expected from a preliminary glance of the building — cheap, shoddy and shabby — but Simon noticed that unlike the rest of the place it appeared to be clean. Cora pulled off her hat.
"Hello, Marty," she called. "I brought a friend to see you."
Marty O'Connor appeared in the doorway of the bedroom. He was in his shirt sleeves, a shirt open at the neck, and he kept one hand in his pocket. He stared at the Saint blankly, and then his homely face broke into a slow gold-and-ivory grin.
"Well for… Where the hell did you come from?"
The Saint chuckled. Marty took his right hand out of his pocket for the first time and Simon grasped it.
"I wouldn't have believed you could get any uglier, Marty, but you made it."
The gunman hauled him towards a chair and sat him down. He looked a little less plump than he had been when the Saint saw him last, and there seemed to be a trace of hollowness in his unshaven cheeks; but the feckless twinkle in his faded eyes was the same as that by which Simon had first been beguiled from his antipathy for the ordinary run of hoodlums.
"I sure am glad to see you here again, Saint. It's a long time since we had a drink together." O'Connor dusted the table with his handkerchief and sat on it. He turned round. "Cora! See if you got any of that gin left we had the other night… Say!" He looked at the Saint again, beaming with a simple pleasure that had temporarily wiped away the furtive defensiveness with which he had emerged from the bedroom. "Where you been all this time?"
"Here and there," said the Saint vaguely. "I've covered a good deal of ground. Have you been looking after yourself?"
"Not so badly."