“Oh, ma’am, ma’am!” moaned Matilda in the darkness.

“Matilda”—­in awed breathlessness—­“isn’t this terrible?”

“Oh, ma’am! ma’am!”

“If Jack should learn that I am here—­” She could not express the horror of it.

“Oh, ma’am!”

Mrs. De Peyster’s voice rang out with wild desperation.

“Matilda, there is only one thing to do!  We must leave the house!”

“I think we’d better, ma’am,” Matilda snuffled hysterically, “for with all of you here, and this keeping up, I—­I don’t think I’d last a day, ma’am.”

“And we must leave at once!  We’ve not a second to spare.  They said they were coming right down.  We must be out of the house before they come!”

“Oh, ma’am, yes!  This minute!  But where—­”

“There’s no time to think of anything now but getting out,” cried Mrs. De Peyster with frantic energy.  “Slip up the front stairway, Matilda, and get your hat.  And here are my keys.  Lock my sitting-room, so they can’t see any one’s been living in it.  You can manage it without them seeing you.  And for heaven’s sake, hurry!”

Two minutes later these things were done, and Matilda, bonneted, was hurrying forward hand in hand with Mrs. De Peyster through the black hallway of the basement.  Behind them, descending the stairs from the butler’s pantry, sounded the chatter and laughter of the larking honeymooners; and then from the kitchen came the surprised and exasperated call:  “Hello, Matilda—­See here, where the dickens are you?”

But at just that moment the twin, unbreathing figures in black slipped through the servants’ door and noiselessly closed it behind them.

CHAPTER IX

THE FLIGHT

The two dark figures stood an instant, breathless, in the dark mouth of the cavern beneath the marble balustraded stairway that ascended with chaste dignity to Mrs. De Peyster’s noble front door.  Swiftly they surveyed the scene.  Not a policeman was in sight:  no one save, across the way on Washington Square benches, a few plebeian lovers enjoying the soft calm of a May eleven o’clock.

The pair, with veils down, each looking a plagiarism of the other, slipped out of the servants’ entrance, through the gate of the low iron fence, and arm clutching arm hastened eastward to University Place.  Thus far no one had challenged them.  Here they turned and went rapidly northward:  past the Lafayette, where Mrs. De Peyster’s impulse to take a taxicab was instantly countermanded by the fear that so near her home there was danger of recognition:  and onward, onward they went, swiftly, wordlessly, their one commanding impulse to get away—­to get away.

At Fourteenth Street they passed a policeman.  Again they choked back their breath; shiveringly they felt his eyes upon them.  And, indeed, his eyes were—­interestedly; for to that Hibernian, with his native whimsicality, they suggested the somewhat unusual phenomenon of the same person out walking with herself.  But he did not speak.