rough his mind that she had watched him manipulate the combination
several times, but he had little confidence in any but a professional
thief's ability to memorize such an involved assortment of figures as had
been invented for this particular safe. It was only once in a while that
he was not obliged to refer to the key that he carried in his pocketbook.

Nor was she looking at the safe, but staring upward at a maharajah,
covered with pearls of fantastic size. She took the box from his hand
with a polite word of thanks, offered her cheek to be kissed, and
left the room.

Price threw himself into a chair and rehearsed the instructions Spaulding
had given him.

CHAPTER XI

It was half-past eleven when Ruyler and Spaulding, masked and wearing
colored silk dominoes, entered the great gates of the Thornton estate in
San Mateo, the detective merely displaying something in his palm to the
stern guardians that kept the county rabble at bay.

The mob stood off rather grumblingly, for they would have liked to get
closer to that gorgeous mass of light they could merely glimpse through
the great oaks of the lower part of the estate, and to the music so
seductive in the distance.

They were not a rabble to excite pity, by any means. A few ragged tramps
had joined the crowd, possibly a few pickpockets from the city, watching
their opportunity to slip in behind one of the automobiles that brought
the guests from the station or from the estates up and down the valley.
They were, for the most part, trades-people from the little towns--San
Mateo, Redwood City--or the wives of the proletariat--or the servants of
the neighboring estates. But, although, they grumbled and envied, they
made no attempt to force their way in; it was only the light-fingered
gentry the police at the great iron gates were on the lookout for.

Ruyler, if his mind had been less harrowed with the looming and possibly
dire climax of his own secret drama, would have laughed aloud at this
melodramatic entrance to the grounds of one of his most intimate friends.
He and Spaulding had walked from the train, but they were not detained as
long as a gay party of young people from Atherton, who teased the police
by refusing to present their cards or lift their masks. Ruyler knew them
all, but they finally sped past him without even a glance of contempt for
mere foot passengers, even though they looked like a couple of dodging
conspirators.

He had met Spauldi