“You’ve already broken your promise twice,” she said. “Do you have to go on like this?”
“I’m merely attracting attention,” he said. “Having now become the centre of interest, I shall rest on my laurels.”
He was as good as his word, but Patricia was unreasonably irritated to observe that he had succeeded in attaining his shamelessly confessed object. The others of the party felt vaguely at a disadvantage, and favoured the Saint with furtive glances in which was betrayed not a little superstitious awe. Once the Saint caught Patricia’s eye, and the silent mirth that was always bubbling up behind his eyes spread for a moment into an open grin. She frowned and tossed her pretty head, and entered upon an earnest discussion with Lapping; but when she stole a look at the Saint to see how he had taken the snub she saw that beneath his dutifully decorous demeanour he was shaking with silent laughter, and she was furious.
The Saint had travelled. He talked interestingly—if with a strong egotistical bias—about places as far removed from civilisation and from each other as Vladivostok, Armenia, Moscow, Lapland, Chung-king, Pernambuco, and Sierra Leone. There seemed to be few of the wilder parts of the world which he had not visited, and few of those in which he had not had adventures. He had won a gold rush in South Africa, and lost his holding in a poker game twenty-four hours later. He had run guns into China, whisky into the United States, and perfume into England. He had deserted after a year in the Spanish Foreign Legion. He had worked his passage across the Atlantic as a steward, tramped across America, fought his way across Mexico during a free-for-all revolution, picked up a couple of thousand pounds in the Argentine, and sailed home from Buenos Aires in a millionaire’s suite—to lose nearly all the fruit of his wanderings on Epsom Downs.
“You’ll find Baycombe very dull after such an exciting life,” said Miss Girton.
“Somehow, I don’t agree,” said the Saint. “I find the air very bracing.”
Bloem adjusted his spectacles and enquired:
“And what might your employment be at the moment?”
“Just now,” said the Saint suavely, “I’m looking for a million dollars. I feel that I should like to end my days in luxury, and I can’t get along on less than fifteen thousand a year.”
Algy squawked with merriment.