Page:Arthur Stringer - The Hand of Peril.djvu/175

 right and left to the floor above. At the back of the landing stood a huge grandfather's clock, and on pedestals at either side of it were two suits of what looked like fifteenth-century armour. The polished metal of these two suits, as obviously factory-made as the clock, threw back Kestner's interrogative flash in scattered pencils of light.

Brief as that survey of the place was, it proved sufficient to convey to the trespasser a conviction of the general shoddiness of its grandeur. From the rug on which he stood to the indirect-lighting alabaster-basin, suspended on gilded links, it impressed Kestner as being shoddy, as being meretricious in its splendours.

He did not wait, however, to cogitate long over this impression. He made his way straight to the stairs, circled about to the right, and under a velour portière found a pair of doors, stained to look like mahogany. These doors were locked. A minute or two with his "spider," however, soon had them open. And he was rewarded by the sight of the steel front of the bond-safe he had expected there.

So without more ado, he pushed back the pine doors flat against the wall, shut off his pocket flashlight, and let the velour drapery fall into place behind him. There, with his straining ear against the japanned steel surface, he set to work on the safe combination.

He worked for a quarter of an hour, quite without success. Then he changed his position, dropped on his knee again, and once more took up the contest between a mechanism of obdurate steel wards and dials, on the one hand, and a long-trained and