The first Colonel Stanistreet took up with a dubious frown which swiftly
lightened, yielding, as he pursued his examination into the papers and
began to recognize their surpassing value to the Allied cause, to a subdued
glimmer of gratulatory excitement.
But he was at pains to satisfy himself as to the authenticity of each paper
in turn, providing a lull for which Lanyard was not ungrateful since it
gave him a chance to adjust his understanding to an unexpected development
in the affair.
He lounged at ease, smoking, his eyes, half-veiled by lowered lids, keenly
reviewing the room and its tenants.
Stone, the detective (an operative, Lanyard rightly inferred, of the
American Secret Service, loaned to the British in order to keep the
burglary out of police records and newspapers), had wandered out into the
garden that glowed with young April sunlight beyond the windows. From
time to time he was to be seen stooping and inspecting the earth with the
gravity of an earnest, efficient, sober-sided sleuth of the old school.
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