Señor Saint Read Online Free PDF

meant.
    She was not blind, and she used mirrors. If she had ever deluded herself, it had not been for long. She knew very well what they told her. Homely and aged and scarred as she was, no man such as she had dreamed of as a young girl would ever love her as a young girl dreams of love. Unless he was blind. Even before the aging had taken hold she had discovered that, and seen the infinite emptiness ahead. But one night, some miracle had brought her a blind man… .
    She had taken him in and cared for him in his sickness, finding him clean and grateful, and lavished on him all the frustrated richness of her heart. And out of his helplessness, and for her kindness and the tender beauty of her voice, he had loved her in return. She had used what money she could earn in any way to humor his obsession, to bring him back from despair, to encourage hope and keep alive his dream. And one day she believed she might be able to make at least part of the hope come true, and have him made whole-and let him go.
    Simon walked slowly through a night that no longer seemed dark and sordid.
    “When he knows what you have done,” he said, “he should think you the most beautiful woman in the world.”
    “He will not love me,” she said without bitterness. “I know men.”
    “Now I can tell you something. He has been blind for nearly ten years. There will have been too many degenerative changes in his eyes by this time. There is hardly any chance at all that an operation could cure him now. And I never thought I could say any man was lucky to be blind, but I think Ned Yarn is that man.”
    “Nevertheless, I shall have to try, one day.”
    “It will be a long time still before you have enough money.”
    She looked up at him.
    “But the beads you took away. You told him they were worth much. What shall I tell him now?”
    It was all clear to Simon now, the strangest crime that he had to put on his bizarre record.
    “He will never hear another word from me. I shall just disappear. And presently it will be clear to him that I was a crook after all, as he believes you suspected from the start; and I stole them.”
    “But the shock-what will it do to him?”
    “He will get over it. He cannot blame you. He will think that your instinct was right all along, and he should have listened to you. You can help him to see that, without nagging him.”
    “Then he will want to start looking for pearls again.”
    “And you will find them. From tune to time I will send you a few for you to put in the oysters. Real ones. You can make them last. You need not find them too often, to keep him hoping. And when you sell them, which you can do as a Mexican without getting in any trouble, you must do what your heart tells you with the money. I think you will be happy,” said the Saint.
    6.
    Mrs. Ormond, formerly Mrs. Yarn, lay back in her chair and laughed, deeply and vibrantly in her exquisitely rounded throat, so that the ice cubes clinked in the tall glass she held.
    “So the dope finally found his level,” she gurgled. “Living in some smelly slum hovel with a frowzy native slut. While she’s whoring in a crummy saloon and dredging up pearl beads to kid him he’s something better than a pimp. I might have known it!”
    She looked more unreally beautiful than ever in the dun light of the balcony, a sort of cross between a calendar picture and a lecherous trash-writer’s imagining, in the diaphanous negligee that she had inevitably put on to await the Saint’s return in. Her provocative breasts quivered visibly under the filmy nylon and crowded into its deep-slashed neckline as she laughed, and some of the beads rolled out of the unfolded paper in her lap and pattered on the bare floor.
    Simon had told her only the skeletal facts, omitting the amplifications and additions which were his own, and waited for her reaction; and this was it.
    “I hadn’t realized it was quite so funny,” he said stonily.
    “You couldn’t,” she choked. “My