The Saint Meets His Match (She was a Lady)

The light of the match focussed the attention upon her particularly, for she was using it to light a cigarette. On the face of it, of course, she was exactly what one would have looked for. On the face of it, she was the kind of girl who goes very well with an expensive car, and there was really no reason why she should not be sitting at the wheel. On the face of it ...

But there was something about her that put superficial judgments uneasily in the wrong. Tall she must have been, guessed the man who watched her from the shad­ows, and of a willowy slenderness that still left her a woman. And beautiful she was beyond dispute, with a perfectly natural beauty which yet had in it nothing of the commonplace. Her face was all her own, as was the cornfield gold of her hair. And no artifice known to the deceptions of women could have given her those tawny golden eyes. . . .

"So you're Jill Trelawney!" thought the man in the shadows.        

The light was extinguished as he thought it; but he carried every detail of the picture it had shown indelibly photographed on his brain. This was a living photograph. He had been given mere camera portraits of her before-some of them were in his pocket at that moment—but they were pale and insignificant things beside the memory of the reality, and he wondered dimly at the impertinence which presumed to try to capture such a face in dispas­sionate halftone.

"On the face of it—hell!" thought the man in the shadows.

But in the car, the man in evening dress said, more elegantly: "You're an extraordinary woman, Jill. Every time I see you—"

"You get more maudlin," the girl took him up calmly. "This is work—not a mothers' meeting."

The man in evening dress grunted querulously.

"I don't see why you have to be so snappy, Jill. We're all in the same boat——"

"I've yet to sail in a sauceboat, Weald."

The end of her cigarette glowed more brightly as she inhaled, and darkened again in an uncontested silence. Then the man with the battered face said, diffidently: "As long as Templar isn't around­­——"

"Templar!" The girl's voice cut in on the name like the crack of a whip. "Templar!" she said scathingly. "What are you trying to do, Pinky? Scare me? That man's a bee in your bonnet——"

"The Saint," said the man with the battered face diffidently, "would be a bee in anybody's bonnet what was up against him. See?"