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Page 74
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.
She went swiftly down the stairway and paused a moment at the
door to look out. The street was empty. She hurried away.
She met no one. A cab in the distance was appearing. She hailed
it as from a cross street and returned to Regent. It was
characteristic of the woman that her mind dwelt upon the spoil
she carried rather than upon the act she had done.
She puzzled at the water color. How could these things be
flowers?
Bramwell Winton was a biologist; he would not be concerned with
flowers. And Sir Godfrey Halleck and his son Tony, the big game
hunter, were not men to bother themselves with blossoms. Sir
Godfrey, as she now remembered vaguely, had, like his dead son,
been a keen sportsman in his youth; his country house was full of
trophies.
She carried buttoned in the bosom of her jacket something that
these men valued. But, what was it? Well, at any rate it was
something that would mean fame and fortune to the one who should
bring it out of Africa. That one would now be Hecklemeir, and
she should have her share of the spoil.
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