Antwerp, in flames from incendiary bombs, had fallen to the Germans, and
hot fighting was in progress between Arras and Albert and from Laon to
Rheims when Napier, not yet recovered from his shooting accident,
returned from Scotland in October.
At his chambers in St. James' he was told that an urgent message had
come for him from Lamborough. Would he please say nothing about it to
Sir William, who must not be alarmed, but very particularly would he
please ring up Lady McIntyre the moment he got back.
Before he opened a letter, or even took off his hat, he was listening to
the agitated voice at the other end of the wire. It begged him to get a
car and motor out instantly to Lamborough. "Without telling anybody,
_anybody at all_," that he was coming.
"I hope nothing has happened to Sir William."
Sir William was all right, and he wasn't to know.
"Bad news from the front, is it?" he said with that already familiar
turn of thought to the unintermitting tragedy across the Channel.
"No, no. Jim was all right. Colin and Neil, too." The distracted voice
assured him, nevertheless, Mr. Gavan was urgently, cruelly needed at
Lamborough.
"Tell me if anybody is hurt," he said with sudden horror upon him.
"N--not yet," came back the astonishing answer.
Everything depended upon his getting there in time.
All the way he tortured himself with pictures of Nan in some fearful
trouble. By whom else at Lamborough could he, Gavan Napier, be "cruelly
needed"?
He remembered Julian's speech about her that day of her arrival. "Did
you ever see such faith in any pair of eyes? It's pathetic, a person
like that. Think of the knocks she'll get."
He cursed the slowness of the car that was going fifty miles an hour.
"Nan! Nan! I'm coming!"
For the hundredth time he lived over those minutes among the rocks; that
lightning stroke in the blood; the astonishment of the two victims; the
shame; the silent, shared, effort at retrieval. Hardly two sentences had
been exchanged between them afterward. Yet there had been no conscious
abstention from the luxury of speech. A bewilderment possessed them, an
aching too anguished not to be dumb.
He had gone away early the next morning without seeing her again. He had
not written.
* * * * *
There was no sign of Nan or of any one else, as Napier drove up to the
house toward four o'clock that afternoon. The quickening of his pulses
on the way to the drawing-room seemed to say, "She is here." But the
room was empty. All the house was strangely still, in that brief
interval before word came down. Would Mr. Napier come up to Lady
McIntyre's sitting room?
"Oh, Mr. Gavan!" As though she were the last survivor of some huge
disaster, a woeful, haggard little lady came forward to greet him. "I
thought you'd never get here. It has been the most dreadful time." She
dropped among her sofa cushions, speechless for a moment. "Even up there
in Scotland," tacitly she reproached him, "you've heard, I suppose, of
the length this spy mania has gone. _Everybody_ with a foreign name is
suspected. Any one who protests, even the most trusted official--openly
insulted--"
"Oh, really, Lady McIntyre,"--he tried to enfold the poor little lady in
his own reassurance. "I haven't heard anything to suggest--"
"Then you've forgotten how we lost our dear good Bloom. That was bad
enough. But what has worried William a great deal more are the
questions, though they are asked only in private--'as yet only
in private,' William says,"--Lady McIntyre clasped her thin
hands--"questions about Greta. William has been splendid, so has Julian.
We have all tried to make it--" The delicate face crumpled suddenly. It
seemed to shrivel as the picture of a face might at the touch of fire.
The touch of trouble--consolidator of the strong, disintegrator of the
weak--had found out Lady McIntyre in her safe and sheltered place in the
world. She turned away the quivering little visage and went on: "There
have been letters. Odious anonymous letters,"--she brought her eyes back
to Napier again, the eyes of a hurt child--"about Greta! Poor William
had been getting _horrid_ letters for a fortnight. He never said a
word about them till the wretches began to write to me. And the
neighbors--no, you can't think what we've been through!" The relief of
tears eased the strain.
"The Scotland Yard people--I've only known that since Sunday
week--they'd already been to William. With absolutely nothing that could
be called proof. 'Suspicious circumstances'--'a girl going out to meet
her lover under the rose.' She told William she was going to marry
him--Ernst; yes. _I_ liked Carl best--such nice teeth. But
anyway--William--they little knew, those Scotland Yard people."
From confused fragments of overcolored speech, Napier gathered that the
growing epidemic of fear and detestation had only stiffened his chief's
determination to protect the stranger within his gate.
"You wouldn't have called William a patient man, now, would you? Well,
you ought to have heard how he explained, argued, said all the right
things. You might as well suspect my daughter of being the wrong sort of
person to live under my roof. The lady in question is one of us. I
_vouch_ for Miss von Schwarzenberg."
Even the child--even Meggy--came to know that people looked askance at
her for having Greta at her side!
Even Meggy! Napier was ready to swear that "the child" was, after Miss
Greta herself, by far the best-informed person in the house. She was,
anyway, according to her mother, the most indignant. Meggy had made
common cause with Nan Ellis and Mr. Grant in ridiculing and condemning
the popular superstition that every German must needs be an enemy of
England. Napier heard how those three had redoubled their watchful
friendship, a self-constituted bodyguard to keep Miss Greta safe from
any breath of discourtesy, from so much as a glance of unworthy
suspicion.
A momentary comfort derived from the thought of these champions suddenly
failed Lady McIntyre. The smoothness of her face was broken again, as,
again on the brink of tears, she remembered the villain of the piece.
"The local inspector--that creature who made Greta go to Newton Hackett
without any tea--he came again. Simply wouldn't go till William had seen
him. I haven't often known William so angry. I am afraid he was rude to
the man. It never does to be rude to these people. I've tried being kind
to him. I,"--the tear-faded eyes lifted with a look of conscious
virtue--"I gave him all William's best cigars. And _still_ he hasn't
given us a moment's peace. Of course William flatly refused to send
Greta away. 'Not all the inspectors in England--'" \lady McIntyre
stiffened her slight back a moment with borrowed resolution. Only for a
moment. The next saw her wavering forward with: "Then two men came down
from London to see _me_! Oh, Mr. Gavan,"--she writhed her locked
fingers--"they won't go!"
"Won't go?"
She shook her ear-rings, speechless a moment. Then in a whisper: "_At
the inn_, since yesterday. What do you think of _that_?"
All that Napier thought was Nan! Nan! How much does she know? And how is
she taking it?
"They must have found out I'd gone to give Boris and Ivan a run on the
sands. Greta and the rest were up on the sea-wall. They never _dreamed_
that those two dreadful young men, standing there as if they were
friends, pretending to admire the boarhounds, were secret service
people, sent down by the Intelligence Department. And what they were
really saying--at least the one who does the talking! I was thinking
only last night while Julia was brushing my hair--things often come to
me like that--I suddenly remembered that I couldn't--not if I was to be
hanged for it--I couldn't remember a syllable the fat young man had
uttered. It's my belief he's a deaf mute. Well, the other one said, if
something wasn't done _at once_, if I didn't use my great influence with
my husband to have the German lady sent out of England, there would be a
scandal. Everybody would say we had harbored a suspect after we'd been
warned. And when he saw I wasn't going to do what he wanted, what do you
think he called Greta? A spy, who handed on official information to the
enemies of the country! Things have got out that they blame poor Greta
for. Oh, isn't it an _awful_ penalty to pay for her loyalty in sticking
to us as she's done through thick and thin!
"Well, these secret service men--one _very_ worrying thing about them:
_I_ don't know how to treat such people; they _seem_ to be quite
superior to their disgusting work--well, they pretend that for her sake,
for Greta's, I ought--Heavens above! here they are again!" Lady McIntyre
collapsed against her cushions, breathing heavily and staring fascinated
at the door opposite the one by which Napier had come in. Napier, too,
could hear them now--those footsteps.
The knock on the door must have been expected and couldn't have been
more discreet, yet at the sound Lady McIntyre lost her head. Instead of
saying, "Come in!" she remarked in a smothered undertone, "I told
McAndrews to bring them up the back stairs."
The door opened. "Mr. Singleton, Mr. Grindley, m'lady."
Two young men came in. Well groomed, wearing well-creased trousers,
holding their hats and walking sticks. Singleton, taller, a year or two
the older, was a well-set-up person, with dark mustache, and frank,
hazel eyes. "Where have I seen the fellow?" Napier asked himself,
reading recognition in the guarded smile. They both greeted the lady.
"_Isn't_, after all!" Lady McIntyre jerked out in a confidential aside
to Napier, upon the supposed deaf-mute's audible salutation. Neither was
Mr. Grindley so very fat either, merely inclined to stoutness. Fair,
slow, slightly bored; his prominent, gray-green eyes seemed gently to
seek vacuity. Whether dullard or dreamer, this was certainly the last
person you would pick out of a crowd for the errand on which he had
come. This plump young man looked at ease, for the reason that he didn't
care, or had forgotten where he was; the other one seemed to be at ease
because he had never, in any place, been anything else. During the
pause, which Lady McIntyre found agitating, Mr. Singleton stood there a
step in advance of his companion, the hands that held his hat, with
gloves tucked in the brim, crossed on the knob of his walking stick. And
suddenly Napier remembered. This frank-looking young man with the long
chin had been sent down from Oxford in Napier's first year. He had done
what he could to shield the culprit, though they had never been friends.
Napier was the first to move, after McAndrews had shut the door behind
him. It was not mere restlessness on Napier's part, nor detestation of
the business these fellows had come about. He felt he must go and look
out into the front hall. If Nan were to come in suddenly--
There was no one. Napier leaned against the wall, standing where,
through the door ajar, he could command the stairs.
"We heard,"--Singleton in his cheerful, cultivated tones was saying to
Lady McIntyre--"we heard the gentleman you were waiting for had
arrived."
"Yes, but I--I haven't yet had time to explain." That poor head, which
Lady McIntyre had jerked to Singleton, she jerked now to Napier. "They
want me," she told him, "to search Greta's things. What do you think of
_that_?" As Napier didn't at once say what he thought of it, Lady
McIntyre flung out, "While she's away!"
Instead of denouncing such a demand, Napier asked, "Where is she?"
"Oh, they've gone off to see some old church, or something, on the
coast."
"You don't know where?"
She shook her head. "How _can_ I remember all the places they go to? A
fresh one every day."
"Has--a--" Napier caught his tongue back from articulating "Nan."
"They've _all_ gone?"
"Yes; and they may be back any moment."
Napier seemed to read in the easy confidence in Mr. Singleton's eyes
that he personally did not look for the immediate return of the party.
But it occurred to Napier that "the party" meant, to the secret service
men, only Greta von Schwarzenberg. It seemed quite possible to Napier's
own fears that, by some perverse stroke, Nan Ellis might return alone.
She might even at the last moment--Fate did play these tricks--have
fallen out of the party. In one of the rooms overhead she might be
meditating descent. How else could he account for that all-pervading
sense of her presence which filled the house? And he was the only one
who knew how much, how infinitely, worse it would be if Nan were to come
in and find them--He glanced sharply through the crack of the door.
"I have been explaining,"--Mr. Singleton seemed to invite Mr. Napier's
cooperation--"since Lady McIntyre is so sure the view held by the
Intelligence Department is mistaken, that it's a kindness to the young
lady to embrace this opportunity to clear the matter up."
"Imagine the shabbiness of such conduct!" Lady McIntyre appealed to the
figure listening by the door. "I am to take advantage of her absence to
rummage among her--"
"No, no," Mr. Singleton protested. "You take advantage of the one and
only chance of proving her innocent without hurting her feelings. It can
either be done quietly without the least scandal, or be done with a
publicity much less considerate. _I_ should say, if the lady were a
friend of mine--"
"Yes, I've heard your view," said Lady McIntyre, with nervous asperity.
"It is Mr. Napier's I have waited for. Can you,"--she stood up wavering,
miserable--"can you see me giving permission to a strange man and his
confederate"--she jerked a glance toward the silent, absent-minded
individual at Singleton's side--"to break open Miss von Schwarzenberg's
trunk and--"
Mr. Singleton, wholly unperturbed, assured Lady McIntyre there need be
no breaking open. He had, as she said, "most fortunately, a--"--Mr.
Singleton smiled pleasantly--"an assistant who was in his way a genius
at avoidance of breakage or any sort of violence."
The fastidiousness with which he repudiated "any sort of violence"
plainly gave Lady McIntyre pause. Even in the thick of a thousand
agitations it was noticeable how great a part was played in the
persuading of the lady by the voice and manner of the agent,
particularly by the voice. Its natural timbre, its accent, its curve and
fall, all connoted the moral decencies, as well as the external fitness
and refinements, of good breeding. If you suspected this man of
baseness, you simply gave away your own unworthy thoughts. The reticent
dignity with which he uttered the phrase, "for the sake of the safety of
the country," that of itself seemed to range him on the side of
defenders in the field.
Helplessly, Lady McIntyre waited upon the guidance she had sent for.
"Have you had official warning of this visit?" Napier asked her.
"No."
"There are reasons," Mr. Singleton reminded him, "as you must see, why a
warning would defeat the purpose of the visit."
"You have a warrant for this search?"
He had. He produced it. An order under the Official Secrets' Act. "If a
mistake has been made, Mr. Grindley and I," he said, as he returned the
document to his inside pocket, "can assure ourselves of the fact and be
out of the house in half an hour. Unless Lady McIntyre should,
unhappily, be too long in making up her mind,"--he glanced at the clock
on the mantel-piece--"neither the German lady nor any one outside this
room and the Intelligence Department will ever know of the
investigation. Isn't that better than the alternative?--having it
conducted in public?"
The bribe was great, yet great was poor Lady McIntyre's misgiving. Men
of another class would have stood no chance of overcoming her scruples.
Oh, the Intelligence Department was not so blundering as some would have
us believe, since upon a presumably very minor case it could expend this
patience and finesse.
Lady McIntyre fluttered to the guarded door. "I couldn't let them do it
with no one here." She clung an instant to Napier's arm.
He and Singleton glanced up and down corridor and stair, as the three
men followed Lady McIntyre's lead into a room at the end of a passage.
The first thing noticeable about the little room was its air of
distinction, bred only in part by the taste shown in the choice of
certain articles of furniture, culled, Napier was sure, from other parts
of the house during that week Miss Greta had spent alone here. Not her
knowledge of values in _Moebeln_ alone, but something less obvious, in
the serene, uncrowded aspect, in the exquisite orderliness, lent the
little room its special air.
Singleton walked straight to the window. It commanded the approach to
the house and looked upon the sea. It wasn't till a moment later that
Napier verified this fact. On the dressing table, which stood out two
feet or so in front of the window, his eyes had found a faded
photograph. It showed a girl in her teens at another window. Two long
plaits fell over the sill as the eager figure leaned out to greet, with
all that joy and affection, the woman whom Napier was here to convict of
felony and to cover with disgrace. No need of the signature under the
sill to say the girl was "Miss Greta's ever loving Nan."
That first cursory glance about the room had seemed both to please and
intrigue Singleton. His face wore the look of intentness, of subdued
satisfaction, with which your sportsman addresses himself to a game he
knows he's good at.
"He likes ferreting things out! He _likes_ it!" Napier said to himself,
as Singleton swung back with one of his easy movements and turned the
key in the door.
"What will Greta think when she tries it and finds it locked, and _me_
in here!" Lady McIntyre bemoaned to Napier.
"Oh, but she won't," answered Singleton. He nodded toward the window.
"You'll see her coming." He laid down hat, stick, and gloves on the
small table by the bed, and picked up a book lying there. He read aloud
the title, "Pilgerfahrt by Gerhard," for Grindley's benefit, apparently,
for he looked at that person interrogatively. "With Nan's love," he
added, as though that might fetch Grindley.
But Grindley seemed to have neither literary nor sentimental curiosity.
By the tall gilt screen set against the angle of the opposite wall
Grindley halted, as if he had forgotten why he was there and felt
unequal to the mental effort of recalling. You'd say he no more
realized that the leaves of the screen were turned back so as almost to
meet the angle described by the wall, than that the panels were composed
of exquisite engravings after Fragonard, set in old gilt. Even when he
moved a pace or two, you would say that he was speculating whereabouts
in a room so scantily, albeit so charmingly, furnished as to boast only
a single chair, should he find a place whereon to lay hat and stick, and
the small despatch-case of the same color as the brown clothes he wore.
Whether for that reason, or because of the inconspicuous way in which it
was carried, Napier had not noticed the case till Grindley set it down
against the skirting of the wall, along with hat and stick.
For those first moments, glued to the window, Lady McIntyre alternately
watched the avenue leading to the house and watched the two strange men.
She made no effort to disguise her perturbation at not having two pairs
of eyes, the better to keep her poor little watch upon "dear Greta's
things." "You don't, I suppose, expect to find anything contraband on
her dressing-table," she said, as Singleton paused to run his eye over
the glittering array. "You may know that's all right when I tell you Sir
William and I gave her the toilet set last Christmas."
Singleton stooped to the faded photograph, an act as offensive in
Napier's eyes as the next was in Lady McIntyre's--his attempt to open
the little, inlaid bureau.
"That is her writing-table," said the lady, with dignity. "Of course
it's locked. An engaged girl always locks her--"
"Yes; this, Grindley," Singleton said. And Grindley, moving like a soft
brown shadow, was there with some bits of iron hanging keywise on a
ring. Some of these slender "persuaders" were notched and some were
hooked. There were also one or two pieces of wire.
Lady McIntyre identified these objects instantly in a horrified whisper
as, "Burglar's tools!"
"Or that, first?" Singleton interrupted, with a nod at the screen.
"Yes, it's her box behind there," Lady McIntyre said, and clasped her
hands. "But if you break _that_--a most queer lock--you can never mend
it. And she'll know what we've--"
Mr. Grindley gave a slow head-shake. "American wardrobe trunk," he said,
as though he had been tall enough to see over the close-set screen, and
took no interest in what it hid. He inserted a steel object in the lock
of the writing-table, and opened a flap as easily as if he'd had the
key; more easily than if Lady McIntyre had had it.
"Her private letters!" she murmured with horror. "Love letters!"
Far more offensive, Napier was sure, than if Grindley had fallen upon
the neat packets and loose papers with greedy curiosity, was the bored
cursoriness, as it looked, of the inspection. Perhaps the other man was
really going to read them through when he had--heavens above! What was
he doing in Greta's cupboard?
"Disgraceful!" said Lady McIntyre under her breath. Singleton was
passing his hands along the row of skirts neatly hung at the side. The
investigating fingers reached those other garments suspended at a
greater height. From supports, hooked upon a bar set overhead, depended
afternoon and evening gowns--the pink cotton, the black and gold, the
lemon-colored--all of familiar aspect, and yet in this collapsed state
odd-looking, defenseless, taken at disadvantage. Napier with some
difficulty recognized the apple-green silk, all its sauciness gone, as
dejected now as a deflated balloon. And this stranger's hand upon them!
"Disgusting familiarity, _I_ call it. He'll be feeling in her pockets
next," Lady McIntyre whispered tremulously. "I don't know how I can bear
to be here."
Napier himself was too aware of a Peeping-Tom unseemliness in looking in
upon these privacies to stand there watching. He turned again to the
glittering dressing table and the treasure it enshrined. What wouldn't
he give to be able to slip that photograph in his pocket? Nan looked at
him out of her window with unsullied trust.
Napier glanced nervously out of the other, the window behind the
dressing-table. While he had been watching Singleton and looking at the
pictured face, Nan might easily have come into the house; for Lady
McIntyre, too, had clean forgotten that side of her sentinelship.
Napier turned round, so palpably listening, that even Lady McIntyre in
the midst of her agitations saw what must be in his mind.
"Yes, _any_ moment they'll be in upon us!" She fled again to the window.
"Grindley, here!" Singleton called from the cupboard.
But Grindley had found something, at last, which, though it seemed not
to interest him, had proved itself worthy to be abstracted. Not one of
the love letters, as Lady McIntyre plainly feared. It was nothing more
exciting than Greta's French dictionary. Grindley came away from the
littered bureau, holding the flat volume open in his hand, and turning
the leaves at random.
Singleton joined him. "What have you got there?"
"La Motte's Dictionary."
"Is that all?" Singleton dismissed it.
Not so Grindley. He stooped, and laid the book on the floor beside his
brown case.
Singleton was obviously disappointed. He glanced back at the open
writing-table. "Nothing else?" he said.
"Only this," Grindley took a ball-nibbed pen out of the tray.
Singleton examined it carefully, "Yes." He, too, appeared to think the
pen worthy of all care. He opened Grindley's nearly empty attache case
and laid the pen on top of a piece of brown paper, which covered
something at the bottom. "And the ink?" He seemed to wait for it.
Grindley was understood to say, "Not yet." Lady McIntyre pointed out the
twin pots on the silver tray engraved _G. v. S. from N. E. Christmas
1913_. "This is the ink," she said. Nobody seemed to hear. Grindley had
gone to the dressing-table, leaving behind him open drawers and Greta's
papers in confusion.
Lady McIntyre followed. "I must trouble you," she said, with dignity,
"to put the writing-table as you found it."
"It isn't necessary," murmured the outrageous Grindley.
"But that is monstrous! You promised--at least, the other one--" She
looked round. The other one, lost to view, was pursuing his nefarious
course in the hanging cupboard.
"You heard him, Mr. Napier?" She spoke with tremulous bitterness.
"If I let them investigate quietly, no one need ever know."
"Yes, _if_ we found we were mistaken,"--Singleton stuck his head out of
the cupboard to say. "But, you see, we find we are not mistaken." He
disappeared amongst folds of apple-green silk and lemon chiffon.
"Not mistaken!" cried Lady McIntyre.
"What have you discovered?" Napier called to Singleton.
It was Grindley, ludicrously inadequate, who answered, "The pen."
Lady McIntyre ran to the open attache case and took it out. Grindley, at
the dressing table, fingering Greta's toilet set, kept a vacant eye on
Lady McIntyre.
"What could be more innocent than a perfectly new pen? Look, Mr. Napier.
It's never been used, not even once!" She thrust the pen into Napier's
hand.
"Look at the point," advised Grindley.
"Well, _look_ at it. Perfectly clean. If it _matters_," Lady McIntyre
said, "that pen has never _touched_ ink. And how can you write with a
pen if you don't write with ink?"
"We might--ask the lady," suggested Grindley, who was actually opening
and unscrewing Greta's silver toilet things, holding bottles up to the
light, smelling at corks and stoppers. He slipped out of its silver
shell a small bottle of thick blue glass. He uncorked it and applied it
gingerly to his nose.
"This is it," he said.
Lady McIntyre, with the dive of a dragon-fly, was at his side. "You
think because that's labelled 'Poison,' there's something suspicious
about her having it. It just shows! That bottle is part of the manicure
set. Read what it says above the label," she commanded.
"_Pour les ongles_," the obliging young man pronounced with impeccable
accent. "Yes." And he took the bottle over to the attache case.
Lady McIntyre made a motion to arrest, to retrieve. As Napier laid a
hand on her arm, trembling, she stood still.
"We must let them go through with it," he said.
She looked at him. With an effort Napier could only partly gage. Lady
McIntyre recovered herself. "Go through with it? Of--of course. How
else,"--she flicked her ear-rings with her drawing-room air--"how else
could we convince them?"
Singleton, with some display of muscle, had dragged out from behind the
pendent draperies a square, canvas box.
"Ah, that,"--Lady McIntyre went forward, maintaining valiantly the
recovered, drawing-room manner--"_that_ is her hat-box. What they can
want with her hat-box!" She tried to smile at Napier.
"Heavy for hats," remarked Singleton, in a tone of subdued pleasure. The
box was furnished not only with the usual leather handle on the top, but
with one on each side. To the top handle the label was still tied. It
bore across the upper end the printed legend,
From Sir William McIntyre,
Kirklamont.
and underneath the familiar hand had set:
Von Schwarzenberg.
Below, in plain large capitals that caught the eye,
BOOTS
"Oh, that's why it's heavier than hats." Lady McIntyre held the label so
all could see.
"It's heavy for boots," remarked Singleton. Grindley had sunk down on
his haunches.
"This is it," he said.
"How do you know?" Napier asked.
"The lock," answered Grindley, picking over his hooks and twisted wires.
He worked for some moments in his customary silence. Singleton strolled
about, opening books.
"From Nan. From Nan. She might almost as well have had a stamp made."
Back to the lock-picking figure Napier's eyes came, from praying pardon
of the girl with the plaits leaning out of the window. "Shame!" the girl
cried.
"A case for cold chisel?" Singleton inquired, looking up from the
libretto of Rosenkavalier. No answer from Grindley, but he put out his
hand and felt under the corrugated paper in the attache case. The hand
came out with a chisel and a hammer.
"No! no!" cried Lady McIntyre on a note of firmness new to Napier's
ears. "You said 'no forcing open.'"
"Unless we knew we were justified," amended Singleton. "We know now."
"You _can't_ know."
"We have found enough to explain."
"Enough to explain what?"
"Why we are here. And why she shouldn't be."
Lady McIntyre turned, quivering, to Napier. "You know, don't you."
"I'm afraid,"--Napier interrupted--"what _I_ know wouldn't help Miss
Greta."
"What do you _mean_!"--her voice was hysterical. "Oh, everybody's mad!"
As the hammer was raised, Lady McIntyre flung out her hand toward the
top of the chisel. Grindley, his shoulder against the box, pushed it a
trifle to the left, and down fell the hammer in a resounding stroke. The
lady wrung ineffectual fingers, as though they had succeeded in taking
the blow aimed at Greta's lock. "Never, never shall I forgive myself! If
she were to come in while we are at this horrible business--"
"She won't." But as it now struck Napier, Singleton hadn't once glanced
out of the window.
Blow upon blow, till the lock fell to the floor. Grindley raised the
lid. He said nothing, uttered no sound, but he smiled for the first and
only time. A sheet of dull silvery metal had met his eye--the top of an
inner box.
Lady McIntyre sat down in the solitary chair, as though her legs had
suddenly given way.
By its two steel handles, which had fitted neatly into felt-lined
sockets in the cane-and-canvas top, Grindley and Singleton lifted out
the metal box. They laid it on its front. With those short, vicious
hammer-strokes that seemed to shake the house, Grindley cut the hinges
through. He and Singleton set the box upright and forced back the top.