The silence that followed was longer, much longer; and there were things seething in it for which the English language has no words.
It was the Colonel who broke it.
"It's impossible," he said dizzily. "I know the clock was slow, because I put it back myself, but I only put it back five minutes — and this fellow was telephoning ten minutes before the times of the races."
"Then 'e must 'ave put it back some more while you wasn't watchin' 'im," said the pimply youth stolidly.
The idea penetrated after several awful seconds.
"By Gad!" said Lieut.-Colonel Sir George Uppingdon in a feeble voice.
II
The Unfortunate Financier
"The secret of success," said Simon Templar profoundly, "is never to do anything by halves. If you try to touch someone for a tenner, you probably get snubbed; but if you put on a silk hat and a false stomach and go into the City to raise a million-pound loan, people fall over each other in the rush to hand you blank cheques. The wretched little thief who pinches a handful of silver spoons gets shoved into clink through a perfect orgy of congratulations to the police and the magistrates, but the bird who diddles the public of a few hundred thousands by legal methods gets knighthood. A sound buccaneering business has to be run on the same principles."
While he could not have claimed any earth-shaking originality for the theme of his sermon, Simon Templar was in the perhaps rarer position of being able to claim that he practised what he preached. He had been doing it for so long, with so much diligence and devotion, that the name of the Saint had passed into the Valhalla of all great names: it had become a household word, even as the name of Miss Amelia Bloomer, an earlier crusader, was absorbed into the tongue that Shakespeare did not live long enough to speak — but in a more romantic context. And if there were many more sharks in the broad lagoons of technically legal righteousness who knew him better by his chosen nom de guerre than by his real name, and who would not even have recognised him had they passed him in the street, that minor degree of anonymity was an asset in the Saint's profession which more than compensated him for the concurrent gaps in his publicity.