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Durkin smiled a little, over his wax-covered key, as he still filed and fitted and listened. Then he gave vent to an almost inaudible "Ah!" for the bit of the key made the complete circuit, at last, and the wards of the lock clicked back into place. He swung open the heavy iron door, cautiously, listened for a moment, and then struck another match.
The black gloom was punctuated by the occasional flare of a match, and the silence broken now and then, as he worked before the safe, by the metallic click and scrape of steel against steel, and by the muffled rasp and whine of his file against the wax-covered key which from time to time he fitted into the unyielding safe lock.
"I bring you great words from our common fatherland, which is Wisdom," said Beroes. "Be pleased to listen and act as is needful." At a sign from Herhor, Pentuer withdrew to the rear of the cave and brought out three armchairs of light wood for his superiors, and a low stool for his own use. He seated himself near the lamp, and took from his bosom a small dagger and wax-covered tablets.
The side of his head was down upon the table and his hands outspread upon either side; a wax-covered tablet had escaped from his left, and a pointed stylus, with which he had been making a line of characters upon the wax, had slipped from his right fingers, for he was sleeping like a top.
"I have given orders to send them to rural prisons," said Vinicius, "but I will recall the orders at once, and let them go to the gates." And writing a few words on a wax-covered tablet, he handed it to Petronius, who gave directions to send it at once to the house of Vinicius. Then they passed into the interior portico, and, sitting on a marble bench, began to talk.
"Why, how troubled you are," giggled Herennia. "Yes, I have my freedman copy down the whole bulletin every day, as soon as it is posted by the censor's officers; now let me see," and she produced from under her robe a number of wooden, wax-covered tablets, strung together: "the last prætor's edict; the will of old Publius Blæsus;" and she ran over the headings with maddening slowness: "the speech in the Senate of Curio what an impudent rascal; the money paid yesterday into the treasury, how dull to copy all that down! the meteor which fell over in Tibur, and was such a prodigy; oh, yes, here it is at last; you may as well hear what all Rome knows now, it's at the end, among the private affairs.
This was judged by the experienced to be a better plan than allowing him to shape letters for himself on the wax-covered tablet. Of course parchment and paper were far too expensive materials to be used for exercises and copies. As books were rare and costly, dictation became a matter of much importance. The boy wrote, in part at least, his own schoolbooks.
She was a wit, and she had a beautiful hand, even though she was no better than the rest of Monte Carlo, ruminated the safe-breaker easily, as he squinted, under the flare of a match, at the ward indentations in his wax-covered key-flange. His thoughts went back, as he worked, to the timely yet unexpected scene at the stair-head, two hours before.
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