They were still keeping their voices very low, as if they were in a room full of ears.
"This is all new to you?" Simon asked expressionlessly.
"Why do you ask that?"
"I thought I would. I've told you all this because it doesn't matter now how much anybody knows I know."
The Saint's fingers had almost finished with the odd metal shape in his pocket. And the message which had begun to spell itself slothfully out from it by some multi-dimensional alchemy between his fingertips and his remembrance began to sear his brain with a lambent reality that cauterized the last limp tissues of vagueness out of his awakening.
He felt his own grip biting into her flesh.
"Avalon," he said, in a voice that came from a long way off in the dark "You've been in this up to the neck from the beginning. You might even have started a lot of it — for all of us — by that parting crack of yours about the Saint after I socked Zellermann. But the play-acting is over, and I must know something now."
"What, darling?" she asked; and her voice was so easy in contrast to his own that he knew where he had to keep his own sanities together.
"I must know which side you're on, Avalon. Even if you haven't had any sense — even if it's all words of one syllable now. Are you going all the way with me, or is this just an excursion?"
It seemed as if she stiffened beside him for an instant, and then softened so that she was closer and more real than ever before.