"It hasn't come to that yet."
"Not yet."
"And it won't, lass — not while I'm around."
She laughed again.
"Simon — really — you're a darling!"
"But have you only just discovered that?" said the Saint.
He made her smile. Even if her laughter had been of neither hysteria nor bravado, it had not been a thing to reassure him. A smile was different. And he still found it easy to make her smile.
But she was of such a very unusual mettle that he could have no peace of mind with her at such a moment. They were very recent partners, and still she was almost a stranger to him. They were familiar friends of a couple of days' standing; and he hardly knew her. In the days of their old enmity he had recognized in her a fearless independence that no man could have lightly undertaken to control — unless he had been insanely vain. And with that fearless independence went an unconscious aloofness. She would follow her own counsel, and never realize that anyone else might consider he had a right to know what that counsel was. That aloofness was utterly unaware — he divined that it had never been in her at all before the days of the Angels of Doom, and when, the work of the Angels of Doom was done it would be. gone.
And Teal's whistle was silent. Simon looked down from a window, and saw that Teal had gone. But a uniformed man stood at the foot of the steps on the pavement outside, and looked up from time to time.
"Well?" said the girl.