[XI]
AU REVOIR
Early in the afternoon Eve de Montalais made it possible for Lanyard to examine the safe in her boudoir without exciting comment in the household. He was nearly an hour thus engaged, but brought back to the drawing-room, in addition to the heavy magnifying glass which he had requisitioned to eke out his eyesight, only a face of disappointment.
"Nothing," he retorted to Eve. "Evidently a gentleman of rigidly formal habits, our friend of last night--wouldn't dream of calling at any hour without his gloves on.... I've been over every inch of the safe, outside and in, and the frame of the screen too, but--nothing. However, I've been thinking a bit as well, I hope to some purpose."
The woman nodded intently as he drew up his chair and sat down.
"You have made a plan," she stated rather than enquired.
"I won't call it that, not yet. We've got too little to go on. But one or two things seem fairly obvious, therefore must not be left out of consideration. Assuming for the sake of argument that Mr. Whitaker Monk and his lot had a hand in this--"
"Ah! you think that?"
"I admit I'm unfair. But first they quarrel with my sense of the normal by being too confoundedly picturesque, too rich and brilliant, too sharp and smart and glib, too--well!--theatrical; like characters from the cast of what your American theatre calls a crook melodrama. And then, if their intentions were so blessed pure and praiseworthy, what right had they to make so many ambiguous gestures?"
"Leading the talk up to my jewels, you mean?"