That lady looked neither at me nor the key. Instead, she sat staring meditatively into space, apparently weighing some question in which the rest of that company could claim no interest. It was only after her husband had spoken her name, sharply, that she came back to her immediate surroundings. "And now what must I do?" she asked, with a new note of seriousness. "Have the maid take the box back to where it came from," I told her. "But be so good as to retain the key." "And then what?" mocked Van Tuyl. "Then," cut in his wife, with a sudden note of antagonism which I could not account for, "_the sooner we send for the police the better_." An answering note of antagonism showed on Van Tuyl's face. "I tell you, Kerfoot, I can't do it," he objected, even as his wife rang the bell. "You've got to show me!" "Please be still, Jim," she said, as Wilkins stepped into the room. She turned an impassive face to the waiting servant. "Will you ask Felice to come here." None of us spoke until Felice entered the room. Wilkins, I noticed, followed her in, but passed across the room's full length and went out by the door in the rear. "Felice," said the woman beside me, very calmly and coolly, "I want you to take this box back to the safe." "Yes, madam." "Then go to the telephone in the study and ring up police headquarters. Tell them who you are. Then explain that I want them to send an officer here, at once." "Yes, madam," answered the attentive-faced maid. "Felice, you had better ask them to send two men, two--" "Two plain-clothes men," I prompted. "Yes, two plain-clothes men. And explain to them that they are to arrest the man-servant who opens the door for them--at once, and without any fuss. Is that quite clear?" "Yes, madam, quite clear," answered the maid. "Then please hurry." "Yes, madam." I looked up at Van Tuyl's audible splutter of indignation. "Excuse me," he cried, "but isn't all this getting just a little highhanded? Aren't we making things into a nice mess for ourselves? Aren't we moving just a little too fast in this game, calling out the reserves because you happen to spot a scar on my butler's wrist?" "I tell you, Jim," I cried with all the earnestness at my command, "the man's a thief, a criminal with a criminal's record!" "Then prove it!" demanded Jim. "Call him in and I will." Van Tuyl made a motion for his wife to touch the bell. Her slippered toe was still on the rug-covered button when Wilkins entered, the same austere and self-assured figure. "Wilkins," said Van Tuyl, and there was an outspoken and deliberate savagery in his voice even as his wife motioned to him in what seemed a signal for moderation, "Wilkins, I regard you as an especially good servant. Mr. Kerfoot, on the other hand, says he knows you and says you are not." "Yes, sir," said Wilkins with his totem-pole abstraction. There was something especially maddening in that sustained calmness of his.