n found in the ditch; she knew by a certain
indentation on it that it was the duplicate key which she herself had
mislaid.

"No," said Mr. Cowl. "I found it myself, and not in the ditch. I remembered
you had said that you had changed at the dressmaker's in the village and
had left there an old frock."

"Did I?" murmured Audrey, with a deeper blush.

Mr. Cowl nodded.

"I had the happy idea that you might have had the key and left it in the
pocket of the frock. So I trotted down to the dressmaker's and asked for
the frock, in your name, and lo! the result!"

He pointed to the key lying in Audrey's long hand.

"But how should I have had the key, Mr. Cowl? Why should I have had the
key?" Audrey burst out like a simpleton.

"That, Miss Moze," said he, with a peculiar grin and in an equally peculiar
tone, "is a matter about which obviously you are better informed than I am.
Shall we try the key?"

With a smooth undeniable gesture he took the key again from Audrey, and
bent his huge form to open the safe. As he did so Miss Ingate made a
sarcastic and yet affrighted face at Audrey, and Audrey tried to send a
signal in reply, but failed, owing to imperfect self-control. However, she
managed to say to Mr. Cowl's curved back:

"You couldn't have found the key in the pocket of my old frock, Mr. Cowl."

"And why?" he inquired benevolently, raising and turning his chestnut head.
Even in that exciting instant Audrey could debate within herself whether or
not his superb moustache was dyed.

"Because it has no pocket."

"So I discovered," said Mr. Cowl, after a little pause. "I merely stated
that I had the happy idea--for it proved to be a happy idea--that you might
have left the key in the pocket. I discovered it, as a fact, in a slit of
the lining of the belt.... Conceivably you had slipped it in there--in a
hurry." He put strange implications into the last three words. "Yes, it is
the authentic key," he concluded, as the door of the safe swung heavily and
silently open.

Audrey, for the first time, felt rather like a thief as she beheld the
familiar interior of the safe which a few days earlier she had so
successfully rifled. "Is it possible," she thought, "that I really took
bank-notes out of that safe, and that they are at this very moment in my
bedroom between the leaves of 'Pictures of Palestine'?"

Mr. Cowl was cautiously fumbling among the serried row of documents which,
their edges towards the front, filled th