“Sorry,” he apologized. “I nearly spilled the beans that time, but it’s all O.K., you can take it from me.”
“Thank you. It is a little surprise that Rex and I have arranged for you,” she explained to the others, who were looking completely mystified. “He has got me a nice strong file; I spent a busy hour this morning.”
Rex began to look mystified, too; he had got no file for her, and it was only while dressing for dinner that she had asked for his co-operation in a little secret.
She produced a flat square parcel from under her chair, and laid it on the table. They had all wondered what it could be when she had brought it in to dinner with her.
Richard and Simon cleared away the plates and glasses to make room; Rex was looking more and more puzzled.
A waiter paused beside De Richleau’s chair and laid a heavy triangular parcel on the table beside him: “The manager’s compliments, sir, and he hopes that will do.”
“Thank you.” The Duke nodded, and gave the man a coin, then he felt the package carefully and transferred it to the pocket of his tail coat; the others were far too interested in Marie Lou’s big parcel to pay any attention.
She smiled at Rex as she undid the wrapping. “For a long time,” she said, “he has been telling us that it will be tomorrow that he will find the jewels — I have decided that it shall be today!”
She removed the last sheet of paper from her parcel. Rex and the Duke recognized at once the gaily painted abacus that she had insisted on taking from her cottage at Romanovsk when they fled to the Château. It lay there, incongruous enough — a childish toy, the solid square frame and the cross wires with the gaily painted beads, upon which every Russian learns to calculate.
“As I have told you,” she said slowly, “my mother always said that if I ever left Russia, I must take this with me; and it was not because she feared that I should forget how to count. I knew that she had taken it from the walls of the foundry after the fire — it was she who cleaned and painted it after that. This morning I filed through the iron tubing which makes the frame — see, now, what it contains.” As she finished speaking she divided one piece of the framework from the other where she had filed it through. She swept some wafers from a dish in front of her and poured out the contents of the hollow pipe.