Imperiously he was ordered from the room.
Anthony Trent sank into a chair and laughed gently. It had all been so absurdly easy. Two good hours were before him. None would interrupt. It was known that young Norton had been bundled out of town until his charmer had disappeared. Gotham Gossip had told him so much. It was almost certain that the Guestwicks would not return to their home until half past twelve. That would give him a sufficient time to examine every likely looking place in the house. The old time crook would no doubt have hit Mr. Briggs over the head with a black jack and run a risk in the doing of it. The representative of the newer school had simply sent all the servants to bed.
Looking quickly about the great apartment, book-lined and imposing, Trent’s eyes fell on an edition in twenty fat volumes of Penroy’s Encyclopædia of Music and Art. Scrutiny told the observer that behind these steel-bound fake books there was a safe. It was an old dodge, this. If the money for Miss Grandcourt was not here there were, no doubt, negotiable papers and jewels. This was just the sort of sacro-sanct spot where valuables might be laid away.
To pry open the glass door of the book case, roll back the works of the unknown Penroy and come face to face with the old fashioned safe took less than two minutes. It was amazing that so shrewd a man as Guestwick must be in business matters should rely on this. It was rather that he relied on the integrity of his servants and an efficient system of burglar alarm.
From the cane that Anthony Trent had carelessly thrown on a chair, he took some finely tempered steel drills and presently assembled the tools necessary to his task. As a boy he had been the rare kind who could take a watch apart and put it together again and have no parts left over. It was largely owing to an inborn mechanical skill that he had persuaded himself he could make good at his calling.
It was striking eleven by the ship’s clock—six bells—when he rolled the doors open. He rose to his feet and stretched. Kneeling before the safe had cramped his muscles. Sinking into a big black leathern chair he contemplated the strong box that was now at his mercy. He allowed himself the luxury of a cigarette. There passed before his mind’s eye a vista of pleasant shaded pools wherein big trout were lying. Weems did not own the only desirable camp on Kennebago.
He was suddenly called back from this dreaming, this castle-building, to a realization that such prospects might never be his. It was the low, pleasant, tones of a cultivated woman’s voice which wrought the amazing change.
“I suppose you’re a burglar,” the voice said. There was no trace of nervousness in her tone.
He sprang to his feet and looked around. Not twenty feet distant he saw her. She was a tall, graceful girl about twenty-two or three, clad in a charming evening gown. Over her white arm trailed a fur cloak costly and elegant. And, although the moment was hardly one for thinking of female charms, he was struck by her unusual beauty. She possessed an air of extreme sophistication and stood looking at him as if the man before her were some unusual and bizarre specimen of his kind.