The Saint shook his head.
"No, it isn't, George. Let's have a round for everybody on me, because I'm going to have to leave you."
He laid a ten-shilling note on the bar and nodded to the landlord as the patrons of the Broken Sword crowded up to moisten their parched throats. He glanced at his watch as he did so and saw that it showed sixteen minutes after nine. Zero hour had struck while he was taking his stand for those last three darts, but it had made no difference to the steadiness of his hand or the accuracy of his eye.
Even now it made no difference, and while he gathered up his change he was as much a part of the atmosphere of the small low-ceilinged bar as any of the rough, warm-hearted local habitues… But his eyes were on the road outside the narrow leaded windows, where the twilight was folding soft grey veils under the trees; and while he was looking out there she arrived. His ears caught the familiar airy purr of the Hirondel through the clamour around him before it swept into view, and he saw the brightness of her golden hair behind the wheel without surprise as she slowed by. It was curious that he should have been thinking for the last hour in terms of "she"; but he had been expecting nothing else, and in that at least his instinct had been faultless.
The boisterous human fellowship of the Broken Sword was swallowed up in an abyss as he closed the door of the public bar behind him. As if he had been suddenly transported a thousand miles instead of merely over the breadth of a threshold he passed into a different world as he faced the quiet road outside — a world where strange and horrible things happened such as the men he had left behind him to their beer would never believe, a world where a man's life hung on the flicker of an eyelid and the splitting of a second and where there was adventure of a keen, corrosive kind such as the simple heroes of mythology had never lived to see. The Saint's eyes swept left and right before he stepped out of the shadow of the porch, but he saw nothing instantly threatening. Even so, he found some comfort in the knowledge that Peter Quentin and Hoppy Uniatz would be covering him from the ambush where he had posted them behind a clump of trees in the field over the way.
But none of that could have been read in his face or in the loose-limbed ease of his body as he sauntered over to the car. He smiled as he came up and saluted her with the faint mockery that was his fighting armour.
"It's nice of you to bring the old boat back, darling. And she doesn't look as if you'd bent her at all. There aren't many women I'd trust her with, but you can borrow her again any time you want to. Just drop in and help yourself — but of course I don't have to tell you to do that."
The girl was almost as cool as he was. Only a hardened campaigner like the Saint would have detected the sharp edges of strain under the delicate contours of her face. She patted the steering wheel with one white-gloved hand.
"She's nice," she said. "The others wanted to run her over a cliff, but I said that would have been a sin. Besides, I had to see you anyway."
"It's something to know I'm worth saving a car for," he murmured.