Page:Arthur Stringer - The Hand of Peril.djvu/320

 together and went on with his search, more guardedly than before, for the room seemed haunted with a presence which he could no longer quite divorce from it.

He deliberated for some time over a heavy teakwood desk which he found securely locked. He studied this old-fashioned piece of furniture, back and front, testing its panels and feeling about it for a possible secret spring. Then he gave his attention to the lock. He was reluctant to force that lock, easy as such an act would make his work. He looked at his watch, calculating his margin of safety as to time. Then he sat down before the desk, balanced his flashlight on the bronze base of a Roman lamp, and began to work at the lock with a small steel instrument not unlike a button-hook.

Then he suddenly paused in the midst of his work. With a movement equally abrupt he reached out for his flashlight and snapped it off. Then he sat at the desk, without moving. For distinctly there came to him the sound of a key being turned in a lock and a door being opened. And he knew it was the door of the apartment into which he himself had broken.

He sat there, screened by the desk-top, waiting for the intruder to show himself.

He heard the door close, and then the sound of a quick step. The next moment a wall-switch snapped and the room flowered into sudden light. And then he saw that the intruder was Maura Lambert.

He sat without moving, studying her as she stood there, with a japanned tin paint-box in her hand. She was looking intently down at the envelope of an