“I asked you if it was not imperative for you to act promptly in order to prevent these letters from reaching your wife?”
“It’s still ambiguous. As I said before, however, it was necessary to pay for the letters pretty promptly, and I brought out the money on the night of the nineteenth with that end in view.”
“Oh!” said Lambert, in a heavily disconcerted voice. “You brought it out, did you? In what form?”
“I got it out of my safety box at noon—eighty-five thousand in Liberty Bonds and fifteen in municipal bonds.”
“Did anyone know that you were doing this?”
“Naturally not.”
“Where did you place this sum on your return, Mr. Ives?”
“Well, I put it first in the back of the desk drawer in my study just before dinner. I intended to put it upstairs in a wall safe behind a panel in my dressing room, but while I was looking through it in the study to make sure that it was all there, Sue called to me from the hall that our guests were going, and I went out on the porch to say good-bye to them. We didn’t go upstairs before dinner, so that I didn’t get a chance to transfer them until later in the evening.”
“No one knew they were in the house?”
“Not so far as I know?”