There was no one in the passage. He raced softly along it to Sir
Thomas Blunt's dressing room.
He lit his lamp, and found the box without difficulty. Dropping the necklace in, he closed down the lid.
"They'll want a new lock, I'm afraid," he said. "However!"
He rose to his feet.
"Jimmy!" said a startled voice.
He whipped round. The light of the lamp fell on Molly, standing, pale and open-eyed, beside the curtain by the door.
CHAPTER XVII.
Pressed, rigid, against the wall behind her curtain, Molly had listened in utter bewilderment to the sounds of strife in the passage outside. The half-heard conversation between the detectives had done nothing toward a solution of the mystery. Galer's voice she thought she recognized as one that she had heard before; but she could not identify it.
When the detectives had passed away together down the corridor, she had imagined that the adventure was at an end and that she was at liberty to emerge—cautiously—from her hiding place and follow them downstairs. She had stretched out a hand, to draw the curtain aside, when she caught sight of the yellow ray of the lamp on the floor, and shrank back again. As she did so, she heard the sound of breathing. Somebody was still in the room.
Her mystification deepened. She had supposed that the tale of visitors to the dressing room was complete with the two who had striven in the passage. Yet here was another.