"You've got a nerve," she said. "On top of what you did to me last night."
The act looked quite terrific. But the lift of the Saint's right eyebrow was only mildly impudent.
"Did they make you wash a lot of dishes?" he inquired interestedly.
The flare in her eyes was like lightning reflected in pools of jet. She was Certainly wonderful. And it was no help to her at all that anger only cleared her beauty of the magazine-cover sugariness and gave it a more vivid reality.
"So you're damned smart," she said in a frozen voice that came like icicles out of a blast furnace. "You make a fool out of me in front of half the waiters in New York. You stick me with a dinner check for about thirty dollars—"
"But you must admit it was a good dinner."
"And then you have the gall to break into my apartment and try to be funny about it." Her voice thawed out on the phrase, as if she was coming out of a momentary trance into the full spoken realisation of what he had actually done; and then it sizzled like oil on hot coals. "Well, we can soon settle that—"
"Not so fast, darling."
His arm shot out almost lazily, and he hardly seemed to have moved towards her at all, but her wrist was caught in fingers of steel before she had taken more than one full step towards the telephone.
He stopped her without any apparent effort at all, and calmly disengaged the hatbox and tossed it into the nearest armchair.