her mistress, as if lost in thought.
Poised thus, her lifted face partly turned away from Lanyard, its
half-seen expression was hopelessly ambiguous. But some secret thought
amused the woman, a shadow deepened in the visible corner of her
full-lipped mouth. One fancied something sardonic in that covert smile.

She went on down. A latch on the ground floor clicked as the door to
the service hallway was gently closed. Lanyard came out of hiding with
a fresh enterprise abrew.

One must kill time somehow, Liane would be at least another half an
hour busy with her jewellery, and the thought presented itself that the
library, immediately beneath her room, should be worthy an
investigation. In such establishments it is a tradition that the
household safe shall be located somewhere in the library; and such
strong-boxes are apt to be naive contrivances. Lanyard did not hope to
find the Montalais jewels stored away in such a place, Liane would
surely take better care of them than that; assuming they were in her
possession they would be under her hand, if not confused with her own
treasures; still it could do no harm to make sure.

Confident of being warned at need by his hearing, which was normally
supersensitive and, when he was engaged as now, keyed to preterhuman
acuteness, he went coolly about the business, and at his first step
found a portable reading-lamp on a long cord and coolly switched on its
hooded light.

The library was furnished with bulky old Italian pieces of carved oak,
not especially well selected, but suitable enough with one exception, a
ponderous buffet, an exquisite bit of workmanship both in design and in
detail but completely out of place in a room of that character. At
least nine feet in length, it stood out four from the wall. Three heavy
doors guarded by modern locks gave access to the body beneath its tier
of drawers. But--this drew a frowning stare--there was a key in the
lock of the middle door.

"There's such a thing as too much luck," Lanyard communed. "First the
service gate and door, and now this, ready to my hand----!"

He swung sharply round and searched every shadow in the room with the
glare of the portable lamp; but that was work of supererogation: he had
already made sure he was alone on that floor.

Placing the lamp on the floor and adjusting its hood so that it
focussed squarely upon the middle section of the buffet, he turned the
key and discovered, behind the door, a small saf