“So now we come back to der Faderland to see my brother dot is a policeman in Mainz. Und Greta is going to see der vorld, und buy herself pretty clothes, und do all kinds of vonderful things. Isn’t dot all we could vant, Gretchen?”
Simon glanced at the girl again. He knew that she had been studying his face ever since he had first spoken, but his clear gaze turned on her with its hint of the knowledge veiled down almost to invisibility. Even so, it took her by surprise.
“Why... yes,” she stammered, and then in an instant her confusion was gone. She slipped her hand under the old man’s arm and rested her cheek on his shoulder. “But I suppose it’s all very ordinary to you.”
The Saint shook his head.
“No,” he said gently. “I’ve known what it is to feel just like that.”
And in that moment, in one of those throat-catching flashes of vision where a man looks back and sees for the first time what he has left behind, Simon Templar knew how far he and the rest of the world had travelled when such a contented and unassuming honesty could have such a strange pathos.
“I know,” said the Saint. “That’s when the earth’s at your feet, and you look at it out of an enchanted castle. How does the line go? Magic casements, opening on the foam. Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn... ”
“There’s music in that,” she said softly. But he wondered how much she understood. One never knows how magical the casements were until after the magic has been lost.
She had her composure back — even Rhine Maidens must have been born with that defensive armour of the eternal woman. She returned his gaze calmly enough, liking the reckless cut of his lean face and the quick smile that could be cynical and sad and mocking at the same time. There was a boyishness there that spoke to her own youth, but with it there were the deep-etched lines of many dangerous years which she was too young to read. “I expect you know lots of marvelous places,” she said.
The Saint smiled.