“Mrs. De Peyster!” cried the staggered crowd.  “Mrs. De Peyster herself!”

“Mrs. De Peyster herself,” repeated Mr. Pyecroft in his grave voice.  “You are surprised, but not more so than the rest of us.”

“But that other Mrs. De Peyster—­the one the funeral is for?” asked Mr. Mayfair.  “Who is she?”

“That, gentlemen, is as great a mystery to us as to any of you,” said Mr. Pyecroft.

“But how the—­but how did it all happen?” ejaculated Mr. Mayfair.

“That is what I am going to tell you,” Mr. Pyecroft answered.

Mrs. De Peyster struggled up.

“Don’t—­don’t!” she besought him wildly.

Mr. Pyecroft pressed her back into her chair, and held her there with an arm that was like a brace of steel.

“You see, gentlemen,” he remarked sympathetically, “how this business has upset her.”

“Yes!  But the explanation?”

“Immediately—­word for word, as Mrs. De Peyster has just now told us,” said he.

“Oh!” moaned Mrs. De Peyster.

Olivetta and Matilda gazed at Mr. Pyecroft with ghastly, loose-lipped faces; Judge Harvey and Jack and Mary stared at him with an amazed suspense which they could hardly mask; and Miss Gardner, with whom he had not yet made his peace, breathlessly awaited the next move of this incomprehensible husband of hers.  Mr. Pyecroft kept his eyes, for the most part, upon the shrewd, fraud-penetrating features of the unfoilable Mr. Mayfair—­his own countenance the most truthful that son of Adam ever wore.

“What Mrs. De Peyster has said is really very simple.  As you know, she left Paris two or three weeks ago on a long motor trip.  During her brief stay in Paris, one of her trunks was either lost or stolen, she is not certain which.  As she pays no personal attention to her baggage, she was not aware of her loss for several days.  So much is fact.  Now we come to mere conjecture.  A plausible conjecture seems to be that the gowns in the trunk were sold to a second-hand dealer, and these gowns, being attractive, the dealer must have immediately resold to various purchasers, and one of these purchasers must have—­”

“Yes, yes!  Plain as day!” exclaimed Mr. Mayfair.

“The face was unrecognizable,” continued Mr. Pyecroft, “but since the gown had sewn into it Mrs. De Peyster’s name, of course—­”

“Of course!  The most natural mistake in the world!” cried Mr. Mayfair excitedly.  “Go on!  Go on!”

Mrs. De Peyster had slowly turned a dazed countenance upward and was gazing at the sober, plausible face of her young man of the sea.

“Mrs. De Peyster did not learn of what had happened till the day the supposed Mrs. De Peyster was started homeward.  The most sensible thing for her to have done would have been to declare the mistake, and saved her family and friends a great deal of grief.  But the shock completely unbalanced her.  I will not attempt to describe her psychological processes or explain her actions.  You may call her course illogical, hysterical, what you like; I do not seek to defend it; I am only trying to give you the facts.  She was so completely unnerved—­But a mere look at Mrs. De Peyster will show you how the shock unnerved her.”