The Count stated that he should personally commence dragging operations at sunrise. “You will see,” he said, “I shall succeed.”
“Let me try this toy, may I?” Cecil asked blandly, and, upon Kitty agreeing, he addressed Planchette in a clear voice: “Now, Planchette, who will restore the bracelet to its owner?”
And Planchette wrote “Thorold,” but in characters as firm and regular as those of a copy-book.
“Mr. Thorold is laughing at us,” observed the Count, imperturbably bland.
“How horrid you are, Mr. Thorold!” Kitty exclaimed.
IV.
Of the four persons more or less interested in the affair, three were secretly active that night, in and out of the hotel. Only Kitty Sartorius, chief mourner for the bracelet, slept placidly in her bed. It was towards three o’clock in the morning that a sort of preliminary crisis was reached.
From the multiplicity of doors which ventilate its rooms, one would imagine that the average foreign hotel must have been designed immediately after its architect had been to see a Palais Royal farce, in which every room opens into every other room in every act. The Hôtel de la Grande Place was not peculiar in this respect; it abounded in doors. All the chambers on the second storey, over the public rooms, fronting the Place, communicated one with the next, but naturally most of the communicating doors were locked. Cecil Thorold and the Comte d’Avrec had each a bedroom and a sitting-room on that floor. The Count’s sitting-room adjoined Cecil’s; and the door between was locked, and the key in the possession of the landlord.
Nevertheless, at three a.m. this particular door opened noiselessly from Cecil’s side, and Cecil entered the domain of the Count. The moon shone, and Cecil could plainly see not only the silhouette of the Belfry across the Place, but also the principal objects within the room. He noticed the table in the middle, the large easy-chair turned towards the hearth, the old-fashioned sofa; but not a single article did he perceive which might have been the personal property of the Count. He cautiously passed across the room through the moonlight to the door of the Count’s bedroom, which apparently, to his immense surprise, was not only shut, but locked, and the key in the lock on the sitting-room side. Silently unlocking it, he entered the bedroom and disappeared....
In less than five minutes he crept back into the Count’s sitting-room, closed the door and locked it.