"The evidence you could give," he said rather tiredly, "could be quite important. That's just half the reason why I'm talking to you now, and using up all this good breath. The other halt is because I'm trying to give you a break. This is your chance to get out from under. I'm not trying to sell you now. Its too late for t hat. But I've still got to try and make you see that the jig is up, no matter what you do; but you can come out in quite a different light if you just make it possible for me to swear quite truthfully that you'd cooperated to the fullest extent with those fine creatures whom John Henry Fernack loves to refer to as the proper authorities'."
She gazed steadily at him with dark empty eyes.
He inhaled through his cigarette again, and said with a glacial evenness that was beginning to grow a little bitter like a winter Minset: "I'm telling you very quickly that this is the best chance you'll ever have. Maybe the last chance."
She hesitated, with her lips working in tiny unconscious patterns. He might have interpreted any of them into an effort to frame the name that he was expecting; but that would only have been his own imagination, and it was not enough.
He still waited, even when it seemed too long. He was that" sort of dope.
And then her lips were still, and tight and sullen and lost again. It was exactly as if a mould had set.
"You'll have to wait," she said stubbornly; and he stood up slowly. "I told you," she said.
Simon Templar drew his cigarette bright once more without tasting it, standing quite still and looking at her.
Everything went through his memory and understanding like a newsreel pouring through some far-off chamber of his brain.
She was so very beautiful, so physically desirable; and in a light way that might eventually have had more to it she had once briefly been fun. When he had first seen her swinging her long legs on the porch of the late Mr Linnet's home, he had thought that she was everything that a girl out of a story should have been. It was a pity that in real life story-book introductions didn't always end up the way story-books ended. But this was not anything that could be changed by wishing.