uppermost box was freshly unpacked and shone with all the intact pride of
virginity.

"You should read some of the letters. You really should, Winnie," said
Audrey. "All the bigwigs of the Society love writing to each other. I bet
you father will get a typewriting machine this year, and make me learn it.
The chairman has a typewriter, and father means to be the next chairman.
You'll see.... Oh! What's that? Listen!"

"What's what?"

A faint distant throbbing could be heard.

"It's the motor! He's coming back for something. Fly out of here, Winnie,
fly!"

Audrey felt sick at the thought that if her father had returned only a few
minutes earlier he might have trapped her at the safe itself. She still
kept one hand behind her.

Miss Ingate, who with all her qualities was rather easily flustered, ran
out of the dangerous room in Audrey's wake. They met Mr. Mathew Moze at
the half-landing of the stairs.

He was a man of average size, somewhat past sixty years. He had plump
cheeks, tinged with red; his hair, moustache and short, full beard, were
quite grey. He wore a thick wide-spreading ulster, and between his coat and
waistcoat a leather vest, and on his head a grey cap. Put him in the Strand
in town clothes, and he might have been taken for a clerk, a civil servant,
a club secretary, a retired military officer, a poet, an undertaker--for