The library was furnished with bulky old Italian pieces of carved oak, not especially well selected, but suitable enough with one exception, a ponderous buffet, an exquisite bit of workmanship both in design and in detail but completely out of place in a room of that character.  At least nine feet in length, it stood out four from the wall.  Three heavy doors guarded by modern locks gave access to the body beneath its tier of drawers.  But—­this drew a frowning stare—­there was a key in the lock of the middle door.

“There’s such a thing as too much luck,” Lanyard communed.  “First the service gate and door, and now this, ready to my hand——!”

He swung sharply round and searched every shadow in the room with the glare of the portable lamp; but that was work of supererogation:  he had already made sure he was alone on that floor.

Placing the lamp on the floor and adjusting its hood so that it focussed squarely upon the middle section of the buffet, he turned the key and discovered, behind the door, a small safe.

The run of luck did not hold in respect to this; there was no key; and the combination dial was smug with ill-grounded confidence in its own inviolable integrity.  Still (Lanyard told it) it could hardly be expected to know, it had yet to be dealt with by the shade of the Lone Wolf.

Amused by the conceit, Lanyard laid hold of the knob with steady, delicate fingertips that had not yet, in spite of years of honourable idleness, forgotten their cunning.  Then he flattened an ear to the cold face of the safe.  To his informed manipulation the dial whirled, paused, reversed, turned all but imperceptibly, while the hidden mechanism clicked, ground and thudded softly, speaking a living language to his hearing.  In three minutes he sat back on his heels, grasped the T-handle, turned it, had the satisfaction of hearing the bolts slide back into their sockets, and opened the door wide.

But the racked pigeonholes held nothing to interest him whose one aim was the recovery of the Montalais jewels.  The safe was, in fact, dedicated simply to the storage of documents.

“Love letters!” Lanyard mused with a grimace of weariness.  “And each believed, no doubt, she cared too much for him to hold her power to compromise him.  Good Lord! what vanity is man’s!”

Then the consideration offered that property of real value might be hidden behind those sheaves of papers.  He selected a pigeonhole at hazard, and emptied it of several bundles of letters, all neatly bound with tape or faded ribbon and clearly docketed.  It held nothing else whatever.  But his eye was caught by a great name endorsed on the face of one of the packages; and reading what else was written there his brows rose high while his lips shaped a soundless whistle.  If an inference were fair, Liane had kept not only such documents as gave her power over others.  Lanyard wondered if it were possible he held in his hand an instrument to bend the woman to his will....