Although he had been in the receiving room, which was also library and den, fifty times over, Belknap looked it over with awakened interest. Whittaker, it was apparent, had a leaning toward panelings and oil portraits, medieval tapestries and deep-napped carpets. Here tapestries formed the wall covering from floor to ceiling: none of exceptional value except the Gobelin over the mantel, but all equally lovely in colors and texture. An impulse, not so odd perhaps under the circumstances, prompted Belknap to test what lay immediately behind the surface of woven cloth and, as far as its stretching would yield to his hand, he found space. He tried it at various points and discovered it everywhere the same; and he recalled having heard that it was the safest way to hang tapestries against the rear attack of insects and dampness. Convenient to know, he thought. He was engaged in trying to locate the servants’ entrance to this interstitial passage when he became gradually aware that someone else had come into the room.

He turned about with elaborate sang-froid and met the gaze of a tall, strikingly handsome woman, who stood quizzically regarding him. She wore a black sheath gown with crimson accessories that included the oval nails of tapering fingers and the clear-cut lips of a willful mouth. The crimson handkerchief tied to her garnet bracelets floated lightly up and back at every slightest movement of her arm. The cigarette case of scarlet enamel which she opened with a deft flick of one hand to help herself with the other, gleamed like smoldering coal.

He had met Nadia Mdevani several times with Whittaker; and he had vaguely realized the relationship between them, but had given it little consideration; except that once he had instinctively withdrawn from a case in which her name had figured more or less conspicuously. The sense of her guilt had been conveyed to him on the wings of one of what he called his wild guesses, and he paid Whittaker the courtesy of letting well enough alone. As it happened, she had cleared herself easily.

Looking at her now he realized that she was inwardly disturbed at sight of him. Perhaps she saw in his mere presence a confirmation of the faint doubts she might be entertaining with respect to the week-end. But her poise held perfectly—in fact it was by a shade of its over-emphasis that he caught the inner tremor at all.

“Ah, Mr. Belknap!” she exclaimed, in her slow, husky contralto. “How ni-ice to see you here. Or should I call you Judge Belknap—or Detective Ordway Belknap? I am never sure of the term to your face. Behind your back I call you Belknap for short.”

“Let’s discard them, all four, and make it simply Ordway, to my face, as you put it, and behind my back. And may I make it Nadia? Remember Bertrand is an equally dear friend to us both. You are looking divinely, Miss Nadia. Black is your color. Although I have seen you when I should have said the same of red, or white for the matter of that. Red and white are your contrasts. Tonight you are fused into a single vivid figure of black. Whistler would have liked you. You have a way, which most women have not, of lending distinction to a color instead of letting it create you. You have a like faculty with situations I am told.”

“I am not quite certain what you may mean by that, or whether it should entirely please me. But I have sufficient vanity to be flattered by your recollection of my gowns in view of how little attention you seemed to give them. Will you have one?”

She proffered her exquisite box and on his “Thank you, no,” crossed to the hearth where she lifted a crimson-slippered foot to the side bar of the fender, and for graceful balance (pose, Belknap thought it) laid a hand against the tapestried wall. It yielded enough to mar her picture.

“I had forgotten these tapestries are but the semblance of walls,” she murmured. “What a cosy place for rats. Although I suppose it was for the very purpose of perpetrating the Hamlet act against rats that the space was originally reserved.”

Belknap was pouring himself a thimbleful of Scotch at the tray standing in readiness on the divan table. He tossed it off, and turned over the after flavor on his tongue, as his mind turned over the possible subtleties of Nadia’s remark. She had made it piquant by a twist of inflection. A Polonius as well as a rat—or so the tone implied.

“We were speaking of Bertrand,” she continued abruptly. “Do you not consider him a little secretive about the week-end, conveying that there is a reason why we are here? Why should there need be a reason?”

“There should be none, Nadia, except our enjoyment of his unbounded hospitality. But I feel myself, now that you mention it,” Belknap pursued, willing to test where her guards were raised, “that Bertrand has something up his sleeve. Possibly an announcement; he likes to make any news impressive. He may have lost his shirt in the Market, or been left a fortune by his great-aunt Emma in Vermont. You know Bertrand well enough to know he’d celebrate either with equal pomp.”

He heard the little whispering sigh that Nadia suddenly drew.

“I hope it’s nothing serious,” she said, more to herself than Belknap. Then, quickly: “Is it the Diary?” she asked.

Belknap hesitated by the fraction of a second. By all accounts Nadia Mdevani was dangerous. Her intelligence, fearlessness and beauty were things that might throw dust in any man’s eyes. Her ability to ‘clinch,’ as she was doing now, with a power greater than her own, and cut her way free from within, had won her many a hand-to-hand encounter that if taken blow for blow would have seen her downed long ago. However, Belknap could see no better way at the moment than to close with her.

“Yes, it is the Diary,” he said quietly; and stood spellbound by the extreme beauty of her face as the color mounted under the ivory skin, accentuating the high, molded contours of the bones beneath it. He could not have said whether she were more angered or hurt.

“When?” Her low voice held its ground; not by a shade did it show disquiet. “How much time is granted us to deal with it?”

He was smitten with admiration at the serenity and ease of her apparent candor. With veteran coolness she took him on. He could do no less than to match her play for play.

“He intends letting the cat out of the bag tonight. But there will be nothing published for several days.”

“Thank you. I don’t know why, Mr. Detective, you are being so kind and telling me tales out of school.” She turned fully toward him and gave him one of her rare smiles, lifting her drooped eyelids enough to show two burning high-lights, like two stars under an edge of cloud. “I had to know how swift the sands were running away. Even you can’t speed them or retard them. And you wouldn’t if you could—for you have really seen me tonight for the first time,” she said, with the faint irony he was beginning to adore because in a more subtle and whimsical way, it counterbalanced his own. “May I?” She took a flower from a bowl on the table and broke it short for his buttonhole. At that moment he had regretfully to turn from her. Whittaker, at his elbow, was presenting the Crawfords.