ing eye took in
the sable top-coat flung carelessly across the foot of the bed, the
neat little heelless Tunisian slippers beneath it, the glistening,
military-looking boots, each carefully nursing its English shoe-tree, a
highly embroidered smoking-cap, an ivory-handled shaving-set in its
stamped morocco case, one razor for each day of the week, and the
silver-mounted toilet bottles, so heavily chased.

Having, apparently, made careful mental note of the rooms, Durkin once
more turned back to the switchboard, and prying loose the fluted
molding that concealed the lighting-wires, he scraped away the
insulating tissue and severed the thread of copper with a sweep or two
of his narrow file. He felt safer, in that enforced darkness, for the
work which lay before him.

The black gloom was punctuated by the occasional flare of a match, and
the silence broken now and then, as he worked before the safe, by the
metallic click and scrape of steel against steel, and by the muffled
rasp and whine of his file against the wax-covered key which from time
to time he fitted into the unyielding safe lock. As he filed and
tested and refiled, with infinite care and patience, his preoccupied
mind ranged vaguely along the channel of thought which the events of
the last half-hour had opened up before him. He wondered why it was
that Fortune should so favor those who stood the least in need of her
smile. For four nights during the last seven, he knew, the Prince had
won, and won heavily, both in the Casino and in the Club Prive. Yet,
on the other hand, there was the little Bulgarian princess with rooms
just across the corridor from his own, and the rightful possessor of
the plain little diamond with which he had just cut his way into this
more sumptuous chamber. For a week past now, down at the Casino, she
had been losing steadily, as of course the vast and undirected majority
always must lose. Even her solitaire earrings had been taken to Nice
and pawned, Durkin knew. Three days before that, too, her maid--and
who is ever anybody on the Riviera without a maid?--had been
reluctantly and woefully discharged. At the Trente et Quarante table,
as well, Durkin had watched the last thousand-franc note of the
Princess wither away. "And this, my dear, will mean another three
months with my sweet old palsied Duc de la Houspignolle," she had
laughingly yet bitterly exclaimed, in excellent English, to the
impassive young Oxford man who was t