"My poor boob," said the Saint sympathetically, "I haven't admitted anything of the sort. I merely said that Miss Avery was having dinner with me. If that makes me the Z-Man it makes you the Grand Lama of Tibet. Miss Avery is a friend of Pat's, and we've got a couple of other good-looking girls here too. We're making a collection of them. If you'll promise to behave yourself I'll take you in and let you look at them."
He turned back into the living room, and Mr Teal followed him with the beginnings of a new vacuum pumping itself out from under his belt. Somehow it was going to be done again — the awful certainty of it made Mr Teal feel physically sick. He had a wild desire to turn back to his car and drive away to the end of the earth and forget that he had ever seen Scotland Yard, but he had to drag himself on, like a condemned man walking to the scaffold.
He stood in the doorway with his hands clasped tightly on his belt and stared around at the four eye-filling sirens who reclined in armchairs around the fire. Patricia Holm and Beatric Avery he knew; but his heavy eyelids nearly disappeared into the back of his head when he heard the names of Irene Cromwell and Sheila Ireland. And the worst of it was that they all looked perfectly happy. They didn't leap up with shrill cries of joy and greet him as their deliverer. They studied him with the detached curiosity of surgeons inspecting a new kind of tumour revealed by an operation.
Mr Teal grunted his acknowledgment of the introductions and stood glaring desperately at Beatrice Avery.
"I've got one thing to ask you, Miss Avery," he said with a hideous presentiment of what the answer would be. "Did you come here entirely of your own free will?"
"I think that's a very unkind thing to ask, Mr Teal," she answered sweetly. "It's unkind to me, since it implies that I'm weak minded; and it's unkind to Mr Templar—"
"I want to be unkind to Mr Templar!" Teal stated homicidally. "If there is any kind of threat being held over you, Miss Avery, I give you my word that so long as I'm here—"
"Of course there isn't any threat," she said. "How ridiculous! What do you think Mr Templar is — a sort of Bluebeard?"
Mr Teal didn't dare to say what he thought Mr Templar was. But he knew that Beatrice Avery would give him no help. There was nothing about her that gave the slightest hint of fear or anxiety. However accomplished an actress she might be, he knew that she could never have acted like that under compulsion. What other supernatural means the Saint had taken to silence her, Mr Teal couldn't imagine; but he knew that it was hopeless to fight them.
He pulled himself miserably together.