IT was while Trent was shaving that the lamp fell. He started, blessed the man who invented safety razors, that he had not gashed himself, and went into his library to see what had happened.
Mrs. Kinney, his housekeeper, was volubly apologetic.
“I was only dusting it,” she explained, “when it came down. I think it’s no more than bent.”
It was a hanging lamp of Benares brasswork, not of much value, but Trent liked its quaint design and the brilliant flashing of the cut colored glass that embellished it. Four eyes of light looked out on the world when the lamp was lit. White, green, blue and red, eyes of the size of filbert nuts.
He stooped down and picked up the shattered red glass. It was the sole damage done by Mrs. Kinney’s activity.
“It will cost only a few cents to have it repaired,” he commented, and went back to the bathroom, and speedily forgot the whole matter.
At breakfast Anthony Trent admitted he was bored. There had been little excitement in his recent work. The niceness of calculation, the careful planning and dextrous carrying out of his affairs had netted him a great deal of money with very little risk. There had been risk often enough but not within the past few months. His thoughts went back to some of his more noteworthy feats, and he smiled. He chuckled at the episode of the bank president whom he had given in charge for picking his pocket when he had just relieved the financier of the choicest contents of his safe.
Trent’s specialty was adroit handling of situations which would have been too much for the ordinary criminal. He had an aplomb, an ingenuous air, and was so diametrically opposed to the common conception of a burglar that people had often apologized to him whose homes he had looted.
It was his custom to read through two of the leading morning papers after breakfast. It was necessary that he should keep himself fully informed of the movements of society, of engagements, divorces and marriages. It was usually among people of this sort that he operated. To the columns devoted to lost articles he gave special attention. More than once he had seen big rewards offered for things that he had concealed in his rooms. And although the comforting phrase, “No questions asked” invariably accompanied the advertisement, he never made application for the reward.