The light came on again, as suddenly as it went out. I discreetly pocketed my cigarette case. The woman was standing beside the safe, as before, studying me with her wide and challenging eyes. But all this time not a word had come from her lips. "Sit down!" I commanded, as authoritatively and yet as offhandedly as I could. It was then that she spoke for the first time. "Thank you, I prefer to stand!" was her answer. She spoke calmly and distinctly and almost without accent. Yet I felt the voice was, in some way, a foreign one. Some vague substratum of the exotic in the carefully enunciated tones made me surmise that she was either an Austrian or a Gallicized Hungarian, or if not that, possibly a Polish woman. "You will be here for some time," I hinted. "And you?" she asked. I noticed an almost imperceptible shrug of her softly rounded shoulder. Rice powder, I imagined, somewhat increased its general effect of dead-whiteness. "I'll be here until that safe is opened," was my retort. "That long?" she mocked. "That long!" I repeated, exasperated at her slow smile. "Ah, then I shall sit down," she murmured as she caught up the lace cape and adjusted it about her shoulders. "For, believe me, that will be a very, very long time, monsieur!" I watched her carefully as she crossed the room and sank into a chair. She drew her cream-colored train across her knees with frugal and studious deliberateness. It suddenly flashed over me, as I watched her, that her ruse might have been a double-barreled one. Obliquity such as hers would have unseen convolutions. It was not the key to the safe she had flung through the window! She would never have been so foolish. It was a trick, a subterfuge. She still had that key somewhere about her. "And now what must I do?" she asked as she drew the cloak closer about her shoulders. "You can hand me over the key to that safe," was my answer. She could actually afford to laugh a little. "That is quite impossible!" "I want that key!" I insisted. "_Pardon_, but is this not--dangerous?" she mildly inquired. "Is it not so, to break into houses at midnight, and rob women?" It was my turn to laugh. "Not a bit of it," I calmly assured her. "And you can judge if I'm frightened or not. There's something much more dangerous than _that_!" She was again studying me with her puzzled and ever-narrowing eyes. "Which means?" she prompted. "Well, for example, the theft of government naval codes, among other things." "You are very, very drunk," she retorted with her quietly scoffing smile. "Or you are insane, quite insane. May I not lock my jewels in my own safe? Ah, I begin to see--this is a trick, that you may steal from me!" "Then why not send for the police?" I challenged, pointing toward the telephone. A look of guile crept into her studious eyes. "You will permit that?" she asked. "I invite it," was my answer. "Then I shall call for help." "Only from the police."