Leslie Charteris - Saint in the Sun - Provence: The Hopeless Heiress
"I'll have to make it another day," Rowena said. "I couldn't go away without seeing it. Tartarin de Tarascon was the first French classic I had to read in school, and I can still remember that it made me cry, I was so sorry for the poor silly man."
"Don Quijote was another poor silly man," Simon said. "And so am I, maybe."
..
"Well, she did leave me everything in her will. I don't get control of it until I get married or until I'm thirty--until then, Saville's my guardian and trustee--but in the end it all comes to me."
It went through the Saint's head like the breaking of a string on some supernal harp, the reverberation which is vulgarly rendered as "boinng", but amplified to the volume of a cathedral bell as it would sound in the belfry.
He didn't look at her. He couldn't.
But she had spoken in perfect innocence. His ears told him that.
His hands were light on the wheel, and the car had not swerved. The moment of understanding had only been vertiginous in his mind, exactly as its subsonic boom had sounded in no other ears.
