“It’s trying work,” he said, sitting down again and mopping his face.  “But isn’t it a beauty, Lester?  The more I look at it, the more wonderful it seems.”

“I told Philip Vantine I wasn’t up to it, and I’m not,” I said.

“Nor I, but I can appreciate it to the extent of my capacity.  It’s the Louis Fourteenth ideal of beauty—­splendour carried to the nth degree.  Look at the arabesques along the front—­can you imagine anything more graceful?  And the engraving—­nothing cut-and-dried about that.  It was done by a burin in the hands of a master—­perhaps by Boule himself.  I don’t wonder Vantine was rather mad about it.  But we haven’t found that drawer yet,” and he drew his chair close to the cabinet.

“I’d point out one thing to you, Godfrey,” I said:  “if you go on poking about with the fingers of both hands, as you’ve been doing, you are just as apt to get struck on the left hand as on the right.”

“That’s true,” he agreed.  “Stop me if I forget.”

There were three little drawers in the front of the table, and these Godfrey had removed.  He inserted his hand into the space from which he had taken them, and examined it carefully.  Then, inch by inch, he ran his fingers over the bosses and arabesques with which the sides and top of the table were incrusted.  It seemed to me that, if the secret drawer were anywhere, it must be somewhere in this part of the cabinet, and I watched him with breathless interest.  Once I thought he had found the drawer, for a piece of inlay at the side of the table seemed to give a little under the pressure of his fingers; but no hidden spring was touched; no drawer sprang open; no poisoned fangs descended.

“Well,” said Godfrey, sitting back in his chair at last, and wiping his face again, “there’s so much done.  If there is any secret drawer in the lower part of the cabinet, it is mighty cleverly concealed.  Now we’ll try the upper part.”

The upper part of the cabinet consisted of a series of drawers, rising one above the other, and terminated by a triangular pediment, its tympanum ornamented with some beautiful little bronzes.  The drawers themselves were concealed by two doors, opening in the centre, and covered with a most intricate design of arabesqued incrustations.

“If there is a secret drawer here,” said Godfrey, “it is somewhere in the back, where there seems to be a hollow space.  But to discover the combination....”

He ran his fingers over the inlay, and then, struck by a sudden thought, tested each of the little figures along the tympanum, but they were all set solidly in place.

“There’s one thing sure,” he said, “the combination, whatever it is, is of such a nature that it could not be discovered accidentally—­by a person leaning on the cabinet, for instance.  It isn’t a question of merely touching a spring; it is probably a question of releasing a series of levers, which must be worked in a certain order, or the drawer won’t open.  I’m afraid we are up against it.”