Free The Saint Meets the Tiger by Leslie Charteris

Africa six years ago? You were away a long time, I remember—”
    “That will do,” said Miss Girton harshly.
    “Will it?” asked the girl.
    If her aunt had been tearful and frightened, Patricia would have been ready to comfort her, but weakness was not one of Miss Girton’s failings, and her aggressively impenitent manner could provoke nothing but resentment. A storm was perilously near when an interruption came in the shape of a ring at the front door. Miss Girton went to answer it, and Patricia heard in the hall the spluttering of an agitated Algy. In a moment the immaculate Mr. Lomas-Coper himself came into the drawing room.
    “Why, there you are!” he gasped fatuously, as if he could scarcely believe his eyes. “And I say!— what? Been bird’s-nestin’ in your party frock!”
    And Algy stood goggling through his monocle at the girl’s disarray.
    “Looks like it, doesn’t it?” she smiled, though inwardly she was cursing the arrival of another person to whom explanations would have to be made. “Aunt Agatha simply sagged when she saw me.”
    “I should think so!” said Algy. “What happened to the eggs? Tell me about it.”
    “But what have you come here in such a flurry for?” she countered.
    Mr. Lomas-Coper gaped, groping feebly in the air. “But haven’t you heard? Of course not—I forgot to tell you. You know we’re next door to old Bittle? Well, there’s been no end of a shindy. Lots of energetic souls whooflin’ round the garden, yellin’ blue murder, an’ all Bittle’s pack of.man-eatin’ hounds howlin’ their heads off. So old Algy goes canterin’ round for news, thinks of you, and comes rampin’ along to see if you’ve heard anything about it an’ find out if you’d like to totter along to the Chateau Bittle an’ join in the game. And here you are, lookin’ as if you’d been in the thick of it yourself. Doocid priceless! Eh? What? What?”
    He beamed, full of an impartial good humour, and not at all abashed by the unenthusiastic reception of his brilliance. Miss Girton stood over by the settee, lighting a fresh gasper from the wilting stump of the last, a rugged and gaunt and inscrutable woman. Patricia was suddenly glad of the arrival of Algy. Although a fool, he was a friend: as a fool, he would be easily put off with any facile explanation of her dishevelment, and as a friend he was an unlooked-for straw to be caught at in the turmoil that had flooded the girl’s life that night.
    “Sit down, Algy,” she pleaded tolerantly. “And for Heaven’s sake don’t stare at me like that. There’s nothing wrong.”
    Algernon sat down and stopped staring, as commanded, but it was more difficult to control his excited loquacity.
    “I’m all of a dither,” he confessed superfluously. “I don’t know whether I’m hoofin’ it on the old Gibus or the old Dripeds, sort of style, y’know.”
    Patricia looked at her watch. It was twenty past eleven. That meant half an hour to go before she could appeal to Carn. Why Carn?—she wondered. But Algy was still babbling on.
    “Abso-jolly-old-uutely, all of a doodah. It’s shockin’. I always thought the Merchant Prince was too good to be true, an’ here he is comin’ out into the comic limelight as a sort of what not. I could have told you so.”
    “Aren’t you rather jumping to conclusions?” asked Patricia gently, and Algy’s mouth dropped open.
    “But haven’t you been lookin’ up the grocery trade?”
    She shook her head.
    “I haven’t been near the place. I went out for a walk and missed the edge of the cliff in the dark. Luckily I didn’t fall far—there was a ledge—but I had a stiff climb getting back.”
    He collapsed like a marionette with the strings cut.
    “And you haven’t been fightin’ off the advances of a madman? No leerin’ lunatic tryin’ to rob you of life and/or honour?”
    “Of course not.”
    ; “Oo-er!” The revelation was too much for Mr. Lomas-Coper—one might almost have thought