He nodded mute satisfaction, brushed the tools out of his way, and bent an attentive ear to the combination.
The girl swept across the room, and there followed a click simultaneous with the total extinction of light.
Startled, "Why—?" he demanded.
"The risk," she replied. "We have been frightfully careless and thoughtless."
Helplessly Maitland twirled the combination dial; without the light he was wholly at a loss. But a breath later her skirts rustled near him; the slide of the bull's-eye was jerked back, and a circle of illumination thrown upon the lock. He bent his head again, pretending to listen to the fall of the tumblers as the dial was turned, but in point of fact covertly watching the letters and figures upon it.
The room grew very silent, save for the faintly regular respiration of the girl who bent near his shoulder. Her breath was fragrant upon his cheek. The consciousness of her propinquity almost stifled him…. One fears that Maitland prolonged the counterfeit study of the combination unnecessarily.
Notwithstanding this, she seemed amazed by the ease with which he solved it. "Wonderful!" she applauded, whispering, as the heavy door swung outward without a jar.
"Hush!" he cautioned her.
In his veins that night madness was running riot, swaying him to its will. With never a doubt, never a thought of hesitancy, he forged ahead, wilfully blind to consequences. On the face of it he was playing a fool's part; he knew it; the truth is simply that he could not have done other than as he did. Consciously he believed himself to be merely testing the girl; subconsciously he was plastic in the grip of an emotion stronger than he,—moist clay upon the potter's whirling wheel.
The interior of the safe was revealed in a shape little different from that of the ordinary household strong-box. There were several account-books, ledgers, and the like, together with some packages of docketed bills, in the pigeon-holes. The cash-box, itself a safe within a safe, showed a blank face broken by a small combination dial. Behind this, in a secreted compartment, the Maitland heirlooms languished, half-forgotten of their heedless owner.