“I—I refuse to gratify your curiosity——”
“I thought you would. Now, the question is, what is to be done? For I know the book is there, yet if I go to obtain a search-warrant, you will destroy it before I am fairly out of the house.”
“You shall not have it to say that I shrank from letting you see how preposterous your guess is,” said madam, crossing the room to the cabinet.
With a trembling finger, she pressed the spring that unlocked the doors, and threw the cabinet open.
A range of elaborately carved and gilded drawers appeared—a set on the right and a set on the left.
“You are at liberty to open these drawers, sir. As I have suffered your audacity and presumption so far, I may as well let you run on in your silly insolence to the end.”
Frank Amberley made no reply. He availed himself of the permission to look into the drawers, which he opened mechanically, pushing them back without really seeing their contents.
As he drew them out one after another, Madam Guiscardini standing by with a fast-beating heart, he was trying to recall some dim, misty recollection of a cabinet very similar to this, which he had seen at an old country house in Provençal during the days of his childhood.
He had a vague conception that about the middle of the double row of drawers there was a spring which, properly moved, revealed the existence of a secret hiding-place. The spring was a duplex one, but how it was touched he could not remember.
It would be useless to leave the signora now, with the idea of getting a proper warrant to search the cabinet, for even if the secret were to be solved, or the cabinet taken to pieces, she would burn the volume the moment she found herself alone.