They heard his car starting up and crunching away down the drive, and there was a longish silence in the room.
Then Milton Ourley found his voice again.
"Now what the dabbity dab goes on?" he yelped. "He sounded as if he was quoting poetry too. You've got everybody doing it. What did he mean?"
Allen Uttershaw held up his glass and turned it meditatively.
"I sing because I must," he repeated. For a moment his handsome bony brow was furrowed with thought. Then, just for another moment, it cleared. He went on: "And pipe but as the linnet sings…"
His voice died away, and left only his clear gray eyes drifting over Ourley's congested face.
3
Mr Gabriel Linnet, according to the Manhattan directory, had a residential address just off Madison Avenue in the Sixties. It proved to be a three-storey whitestone house with an air of solid prosperity which was quite different in style from that of the Ourley palazzo, but which obviously indicated a similar familiarity with spending coupons.
No lights showed from the windows as Simon stopped his car outside, but it was impossible to tell at a glance whether that might only be the effect of blackout curtains. There was another kind of light, though, that the Saint saw as he stepped out — a spark like a durable firefly hovering over a vague grayish shape in the darkness of the entrance porch. As he came to the steps, the shape developed into an ermine wrap encasing a girl who was perched on the stone balustrade beside the front door, and the firefly was a cigarette in her hand. The faintest subtlest fragrance, a thing not to be mentioned in the same breath as the stupefying reek of Mrs Ourley, crept into his nostrils as he came closer and touched his mind with a quite fanciful excitement.
He took a pencil flashlight from his pocket with a pretense of searching for the doorbell, but he was careful to turn it clumsily enough so that the beam passed over her face.