tting itself against inanimate opposition. He was
smiling.

The tools lay beside him and quite by instinct his hand reached out
for anything it needed. I think he could have done his work
blindfolded. Once I saw him lay his ear against the door, and I
thought I heard a faint click. A gnawing rat might have made something
like the noise of the drill biting its way. With this exception an
appalling silence hung over the room. I could hardly breathe in it. I
gripped the rosary and told it, bead after bead.

_"Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death--"_

There are moments when time loses its power and ceases to be; before
our hour we seem to have stepped out of it and into eternity, in which
time does not exist, and wherein there can be no relation of time
between events. They stand still, or they stretch to indefinite and
incredible lengths--all, all outside of time, which has no power upon
them. So it was now. Every fraction of every second of every minute
lengthened into centuries, eternities passed between minutes. The
hashish-eater knows something of this terror of time, and I seemed to
have eaten hashish that night.

I could still see him crouching before the safe; and all the while the
eternities stretched and stretched on either side of us, infinities I
could only partly bridge over with Hailmarys and Ourfathers.

_"And lead us not into temptation ... but deliver us from evil ..."_

Although I watched him attentively, being indeed unable to tear my
eyes away from him, and although I held the light for him with such a
steady hand, I really do not know what he did, nor how he forced that
safe. I understand it took him a fraction over fourteen minutes.

"Here she comes!" he breathed, and the heavy door was open, revealing
the usual interior, with ledgers, and a fairsized steel money-vault,
which also came open a moment later. Flint glanced over the contents,
and singled out from other papers two packages of letters held
together by stout elastic bands, and with pencil notations on the
corner of each envelope, showing the dates. He ran over both, held up
the smaller of the two, and I saw, with a grasp of inexpressible
relief, the handwriting of Mary Virginia.

He locked the vault, shut the heavy door of the rifled safe, and began
to gather his tools together.

"You have forgotten to put the other packages back," I reminded him. I
was in a raging fever of impatience to be gone, to fly with the
pri