She nodded.
“Go ahead, then, Algy. I’ll expect you back sharp at eleven.”
“Oh, most frightfully rather!” promised Mr. Lomas-Coper. “Cheer-screamingly-ho, wuff, wuff!”
He pranced off in a realistically Wodehousian manner, and the girl smiled. Algy was the goods, under his superficial fatuousness, and even if he were not noticeably blessed with superfluous quantities of grey matter he was at least a very willing horse. In the miasma of dark suspicion which lay over most of the population of Baycombe, it was a relief to find a man who was too foolish to be dangerous and simple enough to be loyal. She had always suspected that Algy cherished a fluffy and sentimental affection for her—he would call at the Manor on romantically moonlit nights and try to make her stroll in the garden with him, and, on these occasions, unless she exerted herself to keep up an uninterrupted flow of idle impersonal chatter, he was wont to become inarticulate and calf-eyed. Now, if never before, she felt grateful for his incoherent adoration.
But with the departure of the effervescent and devoted Algy, and the intervention of a blank reign of tenterhooks before the next move could be made and the next rush of action and danger could sweep her up in its course, the leering black devils that had been pushed back out of sight for the time being came round her again, grinning and gibing to torment her. She could think of her man again, and with the clarity of a vision he seemed to stand before her. Her hands went out to him, and then he vanished, and at her feet, in the floor of the Pill Box, opened the square trap-door that she had seen in that room of the Old House. She started back, covering her eyes, and dropped into a chair.
Resolutely she bent to the conquest of her mind. It was no use going to pieces—that would be fatal, when the reins of the adventure had come into her hands and victory or defeat must come under her leadership. To fail now would be an unforgivable treachery to the Saint: to succeed would be a last tribute to his memory.
And once again she achieved the mastery of herself. Taut and quivering like a bow drawn to the shaft in the hands of an archer, Patricia Holm sat in the Saint’s chair with her head in her arms for a long time. The effort was as much physical as mental, and every muscle ached. There were hot unshed tears in her eyes, but they did not fall. “Soldiers’ wives!” he had said to her, last thing before they parted, and she knew that that was the only heroic game to play.
She lost track of time. She must have sunk into a kind of trance, perhaps from sheer nervous weariness, for the sound of someone tiptoeing about the room roused her with a jar, and it seemed as if she had slept.
It was Orace, clad in an amazingly striped swimming suit, with a broad leather belt about his waist. From the belt his mammoth revolver dangled by a length of stout cord.
“Ain’t that thunderin’ flop-ears come back yet?” he demanded scornfully, seeing that the girl was awake. “We’ll ’av ta go wivaht ’im—I spect ’e’s lorst ’is bed-socks an’ carn’t find the otwaterbol. I’m orl ready when yer sy ‘Go,’ miss.”