“You’ll just have to walk to Innsbruck with me,” he said.
2
Simon Templar had been cordially disliked by many different people in his time, but rarely with such a wholehearted simplicity as that which Belinda Deane lavished on him the next morning. On the other hand, unpopularity had never lowered his spirits: he strode along carolling to the skies, and meditating on the infinite variety of the accidents of travel.
He had met Belinda Deane and Jack Boston on the train from Stuttgart a week before. There had been some complication about their tickets, and their knowledge of German was infinitesimal. The Saint, to whom human companionship was the breath of life, and who would seize any excuse to beguile a journey by making the acquaintance of his fellow-travellers, had stepped in as an interpreter. Thereafter they had gone around Munich together, until Easton had separated to join an old friend — “a great-open-space friend,” he described him — on a short walking trip from Garmisch to Innsbruck by way of Oberammergau. This decision had been the subject of a distressing scene at which Simon had been coerced into the position of umpire.
It was not by any means the first he had witnessed. One glance had been sufficient to tell him that Belinda had been blessed with a face and figure that would make even hard-boiled waiters scramble for the privilege of serving her, but one hour in her company had been enough to show him that they must have been doing it ever since she left her cradle, with the inevitable results. Everything that New England and Paris had to give had been endowed upon her — background, breed, education, poise. She could have been taken for the flower of American sophistication at its most perfect. Intelligence, knowledge, charm — she had them all. She knew exactly the right thing to say and do in any circumstances, entirely because she had been trained to circumstances where the same things were always being said and done. Jack Easton, a youngster of less ancient lineage, confessed that there were times when she scared him.
“Sometimes she ought to be spanked,” he said once, when he and Simon were alone together after that last scene.
He was annoyed, because the quarrel had consisted of a healthily stubborn bluntness piling up in competition with an increasingly chilly self-possession, and there was something about the Saint which always drew out confidences.
“What she really needs,” said Easton, “is for somebody to club her and drag her off to a desert island and make her wash dishes and dig up her own potatoes.”
“Why don’t you do it?” murmured the Saint.
“Because I know she’d never forgive me as long as she lived. Besides,” said Easton, morosely practical, “I don’t know any desert islands.”