The battered dispatch box sat within on the empty bottom of the a safe.

She lifted the lid; an automatic pistol lay on a limp leather-backed journal, stained, discolored and worn.  Lady Muriel slipped her hand under these articles and lifted out the thing she sought.

Even in the pressing haste of her adventure, the woman could not forbear to look at the thing upon which these two men set so great a value.  She stopped then a moment on her knees beside the safe, the prized article in her hands.

A map, evidently drawn with extreme care, was before her.  She glanced at it hastily and turned the thing quickly over.  What she saw amazed and puzzled her.  Even in this moment of tense emotions she was astonished:  She saw a pool of water, — not a pool of water in the ordinary sense — but a segment of water, as one would take a certain limited area of the surface of the sea or a lake or river.  It was amber-colored and as smooth as glass, and on the surface of this water, as though they floated, were what appeared to be three, reddish-purple colored flowers, and beneath them on the bottom of the water were huge indistinct shadows.

The water was not clear to make out the shadows.  But the appearing flowers were delicately painted.  They stood out conspicuously on the glassy surface of the water as though they were raised above it.

Amazement held the woman longer than she thought, over this extraordinary thing.  Then she thrust it into the bosom of her jacket, fastening the button securely over it.

The act kept her head down.  When she lifted it Bramwell Winton was standing in the door.

In terror her hand caught up the automatic pistol out of the tin box.  She acted with no clear, no determined intent.  It was a gesture of fear and of indecision; escape through menace was perhaps the subconscious motive; the most primitive, the most common motive of all creatures in the corner.  It extends downward from the human mind through all life.

To spring up, to drag the veil over her face with her free hand, and to thrust the weapon at the figure in the doorway was all simultaneous and instinctive acts in the expression of this primordial impulse of escape through menace.

Then a thing happened.

There was a sharp report and the figure standing in the doorway swayed a moment and fell forward into the room.  The unconscious gripping of the woman’s fingers had fired the pistol.

For a moment Lady Muriel stood unmoving, arrested in every muscle by this accident.  But her steady wits — skilled in her profession — did not wholly desert her.  She saw that the man was dead.  There was peril in that — immense, uncalculated peril, but the prior and immediate peril, the peril of discovery in the very accomplishment of theft, was by this act averted.

She stooped over, her eyes fixed on the sprawling body and with her free hand closed the door of the safe.  Then she crossed the room, put the pistol down on the floor near the dead man’s hand and went out.