Page:Arthur Stringer - The Door of Dread.djvu/173

 she had caught sight of a small metallic disk no larger than a watch-case. Yet had this half-hidden disk been a coiled and glimmering snake it could not have startled her more. She had seen such things before. She knew, at a glance, that it was the annunciator of a dictaphone.

Yet she stood watching the three men before her with a face as expressionless as a mask. So absorbed, indeed, did she seem in her own thoughts that her handkerchief fell unnoticed from her gloved fingers. And it was not until the waiter came into the room that Wilsnach noticed the bit of lace and linen as it lay at her feet. Before he could cross to her side and recover it, however, she herself had bent down and picked it up. But that brief stoop had given her a moment's vision of two small silk-covered wires running from the center of the table-bottom to the rug on which the table itself stood.

She knew, then, that there could be no mistake about the matter. She realized that a plan had been perfected whereby every word of their talk could be overheard and recorded by some unseen and unknown auditor. Wherever that auditor might be stationed at the far end of those small fiber-covered threads of metal, he stood virtually a spy on every