“It is well, madame.  I say no more.  I will go.”

“I believe it well—­you will go!  You were mad ever to dream otherwise.  Fetch my jewel-case—­the large one, of steel, with the American lock.”

“Madame takes all her jewels, then?” the maid enquired, moving about the room.

“But naturally.  What do you think?  That I leave them here for the scullery-maids to give their maquereaux?  I shall pack them tonight, before I sleep.”

("Damnation!”—­from Lanyard, beneath his breath.  More delay!)

“And we leave to-morrow, madame, at what time?”

“It matters not, so we are in Cherbourg by midnight.  I may decide to make the trip by automobile.”

“And madame’s packing?”

“You know well what to pack, better than I. Get my boxes up the first thing in the morning and use your own judgment.  If there are questions to be asked, save them until I wake up.  I shall sleep till noon.”

“That is all, madame?”

“That is all.  You may go.”

“Good-night, madame.”

“Good-night, Marthe.”

The stairway was no place to stop.  Lanyard slipped like a shadow to the floor below, and took shelter behind a jog in the wall of the grand salon where, standing in deep darkness, he commanded a view of the hall.

The maid came down, carrying an electric candle like the footman’s.  Its rays illumined from below one of those faces of crude comeliness common to her class, the face of an animal not unintelligent but first and last an animal.  With a hand on the lower newel-post she hesitated, looking up toward the room of her mistress, as if lost in thought.  Poised thus, her lifted face partly turned away from Lanyard, its half-seen expression was hopelessly ambiguous.  But some secret thought amused the woman, a shadow deepened in the visible corner of her full-lipped mouth.  One fancied something sardonic in that covert smile.

She went on down.  A latch on the ground floor clicked as the door to the service hallway was gently closed.  Lanyard came out of hiding with a fresh enterprise abrew.

One must kill time somehow, Liane would be at least another half an hour busy with her jewellery, and the thought presented itself that the library, immediately beneath her room, should be worthy an investigation.  In such establishments it is a tradition that the household safe shall be located somewhere in the library; and such strong-boxes are apt to be naive contrivances.  Lanyard did not hope to find the Montalais jewels stored away in such a place, Liane would surely take better care of them than that; assuming they were in her possession they would be under her hand, if not confused with her own treasures; still it could do no harm to make sure.

Confident of being warned at need by his hearing, which was normally supersensitive and, when he was engaged as now, keyed to preterhuman acuteness, he went coolly about the business, and at his first step found a portable reading-lamp on a long cord and coolly switched on its hooded light.