Emerging at length, he wasted no more, but turned directly to the focal point of his most immediate interest, that is to say to the safe which had provided the wits of last night's thief with a test so trifling. And, Lanyard reflected, having inspected the thing, no wonder! When, he asked impatiently, would man learn anything from experience and cease to put his trust and his treasures in repositories of such pregnable construction? A pretty, dainty thing, neatly fitted into the base of a period secretary, its door masked by a hinged frame wrought to resemble a tier of drawers, its "combination-lock"—God save the mark!—capable of offering about as much resistance to trained talents as that of a child's bank . . .
Lanyard was proving all this to his own satisfaction, and indeed had already solved the combination by bending an ear to the fall of its tumblers, when the telephone rang.
The sharp thrill of the bell sounded in the study downstairs; the extension instrument on the little desk in the boudoir gave only a muffled click.
Lanyard used a silk handkerchief on the face of the safe to smudge out fingerprints, shut the false front, and moved lightly out into the hall, arriving at the rail round the stairway at the moment when the vocational singsong of the butler broke upon the conversation of Folly and her friends:
"Beg pardon, but Mr. Mallison is being wanted on the telephone."
With neither delay nor compunction Lanyard turned back to the boudoir extension, and had its receiver at his ear when Mallison arrived in the study and breathed a melodious "Hello?" to the waiting wire. But when a strange voice answered him, feminine at that, the eavesdropper was taken with a twinge of mixed chagrin and distaste, who had hoped for something worse than this and more illuminating, who had hastily set his heart on gaining instruction from Morphew's pompously measured rumble, and who, finally, knew no delight whatever in the prospect of prying upon some trivial affair of sentiment such as was promised by the cloying affection of this strange woman's salutation: "Is that you, Mally darling?"
Only the striking ambiguity of the reply she got helped Lanyard to overcome an impulse to hang up forthwith.
"Yes," Mallison pronounced too clearly, too loudly, and in a manner of cold enquiry that carried no conviction whatever—"this is Mr. Mallison speaking. Who wants him?"
"Clever old sweetie!" the unknown applauded with a confidential laugh. "I do hope she can hear you; but I suppose she isn't in the same room if you have to shout like that. Better soft-pedal it a bit, dear, or the little lady may get leary."
To this Mallison replied, again remarkably as to sense, and in accents of unmistakably mortified amazement: "Oh, for Heaven's sake! you don't mean to say it's tonight? I don't see how I could possibly have let anything so important slip my mind . . ."