"And then what?"
"You'll see."
Simon nodded pleasantly, and went up to his room. The telephone was ringing.
"Hamilton," said the voice at the other end. "I wish you'd be more careful. Do you think I haven't anything else to do with my men except send them to pull you out of jams?"
4
For a considerable time after the Saint had left, there was a nominal silence in the dining room of 21. Nominal, because of course there was never any actual silence in that much-publicised pub except when it was closed for the night. The chatter of crocks, cutlery, concubines and creeps went on without interruption or change of tempo, a formless obbligato like the fiddling of insects in a tropic night which could only be heard by forced attention. It washed up against the table where Zellermann and Avalon sat, and still left them isolated in a pool of stillness.
Of Avalon one could only have said that she was thinking. Her face was intent and abstracted but without mood. If it suggested any tension, it was only by its unnatural repose.
Dr. Zellermann avoided that suggestion by just enough play with cocktail glass and cigarette, with idle glances around the room, to convey a disinterested expectation that this hiatus was purely transitory, and that he was merely respecting it with polite acceptance.
He turned to Avalon at last with a sympathetic smile.
"I'm so sorry," he said in his best tableside manner.