Pulling a key from the pocket of his vast waistcoat, he said in his quiet voice, so seductive and ominous: 

“Is this the key of the safe?”

He offered it delicately to Audrey.

It was the key of the safe.

“Did they find it in the ditch?” Audrey demanded, blushing, for she knew that the key had not been found in the ditch; she knew by a certain indentation on it that it was the duplicate key which she herself had mislaid.

“No,” said Mr. Cowl.  “I found it myself, and not in the ditch.  I remembered you had said that you had changed at the dressmaker’s in the village and had left there an old frock.”

“Did I?” murmured Audrey, with a deeper blush.

Mr. Cowl nodded.

“I had the happy idea that you might have had the key and left it in the pocket of the frock.  So I trotted down to the dressmaker’s and asked for the frock, in your name, and lo! the result!”

He pointed to the key lying in Audrey’s long hand.

“But how should I have had the key, Mr. Cowl?  Why should I have had the key?” Audrey burst out like a simpleton.

“That, Miss Moze,” said he, with a peculiar grin and in an equally peculiar tone, “is a matter about which obviously you are better informed than I am.  Shall we try the key?”

With a smooth undeniable gesture he took the key again from Audrey, and bent his huge form to open the safe.  As he did so Miss Ingate made a sarcastic and yet affrighted face at Audrey, and Audrey tried to send a signal in reply, but failed, owing to imperfect self-control.  However, she managed to say to Mr. Cowl’s curved back: 

“You couldn’t have found the key in the pocket of my old frock, Mr. Cowl.”

“And why?” he inquired benevolently, raising and turning his chestnut head.  Even in that exciting instant Audrey could debate within herself whether or not his superb moustache was dyed.

“Because it has no pocket.”

“So I discovered,” said Mr. Cowl, after a little pause.  “I merely stated that I had the happy idea—­for it proved to be a happy idea—­that you might have left the key in the pocket.  I discovered it, as a fact, in a slit of the lining of the belt....  Conceivably you had slipped it in there—­in a hurry.”  He put strange implications into the last three words.  “Yes, it is the authentic key,” he concluded, as the door of the safe swung heavily and silently open.

Audrey, for the first time, felt rather like a thief as she beheld the familiar interior of the safe which a few days earlier she had so successfully rifled.  “Is it possible,” she thought, “that I really took bank-notes out of that safe, and that they are at this very moment in my bedroom between the leaves of ’Pictures of Palestine’?”

Mr. Cowl was cautiously fumbling among the serried row of documents which, their edges towards the front, filled the steel shelf above the drawers.  Audrey had never experienced any curiosity concerning the documents.  Lucre alone had interested the base creature.  No documents would have helped her to freedom.  But now she thought apprehensively:  “My fate may be among those documents.”  She was quite prepared to learn that her father had done something silly in his will.