“But, of course, by tapping an exceptionally strong power-circuit somewhere in the neighborhood, I could fuse portions of the steel with electricity, and then cut it away like putty. Yet all that, you see, is not only mechanical and coarse, and full of drawbacks, but it’s doing what we don’t want to do. It’s absolutely ruining a valuable deposit-vault, and might very well be interpreted as and called a criminal destruction of property. We have no moral and legal right to smash this gentleman’s safe. But in that safe lies a stone to which he has neither moral nor legal right, and it’s the stone, and only the stone, that we want.”
“Then what are we to do?”
“Use these thick heads of ours, as we ought. We must think, and not pound our way into that vault. I mean, Frank, that we have got to get at that stone as Ottenheimer himself would!”
They looked at each other for a minute of unbroken silence, the one trying to follow the other’s wider line of thought.
“Well, there is where our test comes in, I suppose,” said Frances, valiantly, feeling for the first time a little qualm of doubt.
Durkin, who had been plunged in thought, turned to her with a sudden change of manner.
“You’re a bad lot, Frank!” he said, warmly, catching her frail-looking hands in his own.
“I know it,” she answered, wistfully, leaning passively on her elbows. “But some day I am going to change—we’re both going to change!” And she stroked his studiously bent head with her hand, in a miserably solicitous, maternal sort of way, and sighed heavily once or twice, trying in vain to console herself with the question as to why a good game should be spoilt by a doubtful philosophy.
CHAPTER X
Entrenched in her little top-floor studio, behind a show-case of cotillion-favors, Miss Cecelia Starr sat in her wicker rocker, very quietly and very contentedly sewing. She felt that it had been an exceptionably profitable day for her.