“You cannot deny that the book is in this house--that you carry it about with you--that----” “What?” “That it is in this very room.” “What more, sir? My patience, I warn you, is well-nigh exhausted. Beware, sir--beware! My temper is not of the most angelic mold, and I am very weary of this folly.” “Madam Guiscardini, I ask you plainly, is not that stolen book in yonder cabinet?” demanded the young lawyer. It was his last throw, and he watched the result with a keen and eager gaze. The signora made one step, with an affrighted look, as if to take flight. Then she paused, and drew two or three deep, sobbing breaths, like some wild animal pressed very close by the hunters. “You look like a gentleman,” she cried, after making some ineffectual efforts to speak; “and you behave like a footpad. I know nothing of the book you rave about. I have never heard of the man whose name you have brought forward--this person in the employ of Captain Desfrayne--I--I----” “You have not answered my question. Can you distinctly say the book is _not_ in that cabinet? You dare not say so.” “If a denial will satisfy you, I can safely say no book of any kind is within that cabinet,” said madam. “Our interview is at an end, and I decline to receive you again on any pretense whatever.” “You dare not open that cabinet, and let me see for myself if what you say is true,” said Frank Amberley. “You do not believe me, then?” “Candidly, I do not. I say the book is there.” “I--I refuse to gratify your curiosity----” “I thought you would. Now, the question is, what is to be done? For I _know_ the book is there, yet if I go to obtain a search-warrant, you will destroy it before I am fairly out of the house.” “You shall not have it to say that I shrank from letting you see how preposterous your guess is,” said madam, crossing the room to the cabinet. With a trembling finger, she pressed the spring that unlocked the doors, and threw the cabinet open. A range of elaborately carved and gilded drawers appeared--a set on the right and a set on the left. “You are at liberty to open these drawers, sir. As I have suffered your audacity and presumption so far, I may as well let you run on in your silly insolence to the end.” Frank Amberley made no reply. He availed himself of the permission to look into the drawers, which he opened mechanically, pushing them back without really seeing their contents. As he drew them out one after another, Madam Guiscardini standing by with a fast-beating heart, he was trying to recall some dim, misty recollection of a cabinet very similar to this, which he had seen at an old country house in Provençal during the days of his childhood. He had a vague conception that about the middle of the double row of drawers there was a spring which, properly moved, revealed the existence of a secret hiding-place. The spring was a duplex one, but how it was touched he could not remember.