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The Brass Bowl by Louis Joseph Vance
page 150 of 268 (55%)
evening paper with his meal.

When the former was brought him, he sat up and began to take a new interest
in life. The glaring head-lines that met his eye on the front page proved
as bracing as a slap in the face.

"'The Maitland Jewels,'" he read, half aloud: "'Daring Attempt at Burglary.
"Mad" Maitland Catches "Handsome Dan" Anisty in the Act of Cracking His
Safe at Maitland Manor. Which was Which? Both Principals Disappear.'"

A dull red glow suffused the reader's countenance; he compressed his lips,
only opening them once, and then to emit a monosyllabic oath, which can
hardly have proved any considerable relief to his surcharged emotional
nature.

The news-story was exploited as a "beat"; it could have been little else,
since nine-tenths of its "exclusive details" had been born full-winged from
the fecund imagination of a busy reporter to whom Maitland had refused an
interview while in his bath, some three hours earlier. Maitland discovered
with relief that boiled down to essentials it consisted simply of
the statement that somebody (presumably himself) had caught somebody
(presumably Anisty) burglarizing the library safe at Maitland Manor that
morning: that one of the somebodies (no one knew which) had overpowered the
other and left him in charge of the butler, who had presently permitted his
prisoner to escape and then talked for publication.

It was not to this so much that Maitland objected. It was the illustrations
that alternately saddened and maddened the young man: the said
illustrations comprising blurred half-tone reproductions of photographs
taken on the Maitland estate; a diagram of the library, as fanciful as
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