The cupboard was open, and had evidently been ransacked.

He rang up the domestics, and would have charged them all with having done violence to the key, but that on reflection he considered this to be a way of binding faggots together, and he resolved to take them one by one, like the threading Jesuit that he was, and so get a Judas.

Laura's return saved him from much exercise of his peculiar skill.

She, with a cool 'Ebbene!' asked him how long he had expected the money to remain there.

Upon which, enraged, he accused her of devoting the money to the accursed patriotic cause.