After a while the conference between uncle and nephew ended. Mr. Page would not allow the young man to depart from the house at that hour of the night with the gem, pointing out (reasonably enough) that nobody but a fool would be abroad at such a time with five hundred thousand dollars on his person; though, in his anxiety to secure the ruby and be away before his uncle had an opportunity to change his mind, Maillot might have retorted that a fool would not have had it at all.
"There are men who have left no stone unturned to discover where I have kept this stone," Mr. Page had concluded, with another chuckle, "and they have by no means given it up yet." Then, with grim significance in view of the tragedy which so swiftly followed,—"I 'd have been murdered long ago, if it would have helped 'em to finding where I keep the stone hid."
The leather jewel-box—shabby, according to Maillot's description, and plainly showing the marks of age—was at last closed, and shortly the young man was shown to his room by Mr. Page.
Maillot declared that, ascribing the circumstance to reaction from the evening's powerful excitement, he almost immediately sank into a deep sleep.
"I was as exhausted," he amplified, "as if I had been all day digging ditches or shovelling coal. I could scarcely realize that my mission had succeeded; I feared the entire proceeding was only a stupendous, ghastly hoax, which my uncle had in mind, but to what end, or who the intended victim, I could not in the least conceive.
"And then came a crash that made me think the house had collapsed, and I knew I had been asleep. I was only dimly sensible that the noise, whatever its source, had been loud and decidedly out of place in this household at such an hour.
"I sprang from bed, and first thing banged against the door of a wardrobe, which had swung open. It nearly knocked my brains out, and hurt something awful. So I straightway forgot all about the noise, and after groping a while for matches, presently found one and lighted the candle. Then I filled the basin on the wash-stand and bathed my eye."
What followed was something more than corroborative of Burke's statement. After the secretary had rapped and Maillot thrown open the door, the latter was considerably surprised at Burke's very patent fright.
"The plain truth of the matter is that the fellow was in a condition of cowering terror," was Maillot's language, "and when I learned that he had n't made the first move toward ascertaining the cause of the disturbance, why, I simply pushed him to one side and went to see about it myself.
"Burke disgusted me. He would neither approach the body nor allow me to get very far away from him; and when I broached the matter of going after help, he even went so far as to argue with me that there was no necessity for either of us leaving the house until daylight. The mere suggestion that he should wait here alone threw him into a blue funk; so I was finally obliged to tell him flatly, that if he did n't go, I would, and that he should n't follow me, either.