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Rh Lanyard bowed gravely. "Thank you," he said. "And Colonel Stanistreet?"

"Is just finishing breakfast. He will be down directly. Please be seated, make yourself entirely at ease. And will you excuse me?"

"With pleasure," Lanyard assured him, his gravity unbroken.

A doubt clouded Mr. Blensop's bright eyes, but its transit was instantaneous. He turned forthwith to join the iron-gray man before the portrait which concealed the safe.

"And now, Mr. Stone," said Mr. Blensop, with indulgence.

"Well, sir," said Mr. Stone quietly, "if you'll be good enough to show me how this contraption works, maybe I'll find out something interesting, maybe not."

Mr. Blensop proceeded to oblige by operating the lever and sliding aside the portrait.

"Thanks," said Mr. Stone, producing a magnifying glass from a waistcoat pocket and beginning to peer myopically at the face of the safe. "I take it nobody's been pawing over this since the late, as you might say, unpleasantness?"

"Not a soul has touched it. By Colonel Stanistreet's order it was covered as soon as we found it had been tampered with."

"Um-m," Mr. Stone acknowledged, bending close to his work.

Partially, perhaps, by way of administering an urbane rebuke to Lanyard for his readiness to dispense with his society, Mr. Blensop remained in the neighbourhood