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 the steel shelf above the drawers. Audrey had never experienced any curiosity concerning the documents. Lucre alone had interested the base creature. No documents would have helped her to freedom. But now she thought apprehensively: “My fate may be among those documents.” She was quite prepared to learn that her father had done something silly in his will.
“This resembles a testament,” said Mr. Cowl, smiling to himself, and pulling out a foolscap scrip, folded and endorsed. “Yes. Dated last year.”
He unfolded the document; a letter slipped from the interior of it; he placed the letter on the small occasional table next to the desk, and offered the will to Audrey with precisely the same gesture as he had offered the key.
Audrey tried to decipher the will, and completely failed.