“Just now! You don’t think I lay there for an hour necking with a snake, do you? As soon as it fell on me I woke up, and as soon as I woke up I saw it, and of course I let out a yell at once. You heard me yell, didn’t you, Esther? And right after that the door banged. Did you hear that?”
“Yes, I heard it,” said the Saint.
But he was thinking of something else. And for that once at least, even though she had admitted that she was not so bright, he knew that Esther was all the way there with him. He could feel her mind there with him, even without turning to find her eyes fastened on his face, even before she spoke.
“But that proves it, Simon! You must see that, don’t you? I couldn’t possibly have done it, could I?”
“Why, where were you?” Freddie demanded.
She drew herself up defiantly and faced him.
“I was in Simon’s room.”
Freddie stood hunched and stiff and staring at them. And yet the Saint realised that it wasn’t any positive crystallising of expression that made him look ugly. It was actually the reverse. His puffy face was simply blank and relaxed. And on that sludgy foundation, the crinkles of unremitting feverish bonhomie, the lines and bunchings of laborious domineering enthusiasm, drained of their vital nervous activation, were left like a mass of soft sloppy scars in which the whole synopsis of his life was hieroglyphed.
“What is it now?” Lissa’s voice asked abruptly.
It was a voice that set out to be sharp and matter-of-fact, and failed by an infinitesimal quantity that only such ceaselessly critical ears as the Saint’s would catch.