“Oh don’t—don’t you dare open it!”
Pape, who duly had pressed his heart, bowed with care, if not grace, and was in the act of pressing the catch, felt the box snatched from his grasp. In his fumbling, however, his thumb had succeeded. As Jane seized her treasure the lid sprang back. One look she gave into it, then swayed in the patch of lamplight very like the limp ladies he had been mentioning. A face of the pure pallor of hers scarcely could be said to turn pale, but a ghastly light spread over it. Her eyes distended and darkened with horror. A shudder took her. She looked about to fall.
“It is—empty! See, it is empty,” she moaned.
Pape was in time to steady her into a chair. Aunt Helene hovered over her anxiously.
“What’s gone wrong with you, childie? You’re the one that’s in a run-down state. Here’s your box, Jane dear. Look, it isn’t stolen at all. Pinch yourself. Waken up. Everything’s all right.”
But Jane did not return her relative’s smile; clutched both fat arms of the chair with both slim hands; stared ahead fixedly, as if trying to think.
“It is,” she repeated under her breath, “empty.”
From his urgent desire to relieve and help her, Pape intruded into her painful abstraction.
“Then it wasn’t the box you valued, so much as its contents,” he stated to her. “From the shock you have shown on finding it empty, I gather that the safe has been robbed after all. Will you tell me of what?”
Her lips moved. He had to lean low to hear her sporadic utterances.