“Say, this scheme’s the best ever!  The day we learn Mrs. De Peyster has landed, we dress you up as a top-notcher—­gad, but we can make you look the part!—­we put you in a swell carriage, with her coat of arms painted on it—­and you go around to Tiffany’s and all the other swell shops where in the mean time I’ll have learned Mrs. De Peyster has charge accounts.  You select the most valuable articles in the shop, and then in the most casual, dignified manner,—­I can coach you on how to put on the dignity,—­you remark, ’Charge to my account, and I’ll just take it along with me.’  And off you go, with a diamond necklace under your arm.  And same thing at all the shops.  Then we duck before the thing breaks, and divide the fruits of our industry and superior intelligence, as the economists say.  Isn’t that one great little game!”

Mrs. De Peyster stared at his face, grinning like an elated gargoyle; herself utterly limp, her every nerve a filament of icy horror.

“Well, what do you say, girls?” prompted Mr. Pyecroft.

Mrs. De Peyster at first could say nothing at all.  Whereupon the young man, gleeful over his invention, prompted her again.

“I—­can’t—­can’t do it,” she gulped out.

“Can’t do it!” He stared at her, amazed.  “Say, do you realize what you’re passing up?”

“I can’t do it,” repeated Mrs. De Peyster.

“Why?” he demanded.

She did not reply.

He stood up, smiling again.  “I won’t argue with you; it’s bigger than anything you ever pulled off—­so big, I guess it stuns you; I’ll just let the matter soak in, and put up its own argument.  You’ll come in, all right,” he continued confidently, “for you need money, and I’m the party that can supply you.  And to make certain that you don’t get the money elsewhere, I’ll just take along this vault of the First National Bank as security”—­with which he slipped Mrs. De Peyster’s pearl pendant into his pocket.  “Now, think the matter over, girls.  I’ll be back in half an hour.  So-long for the present.”

The door closed behind him.

Mrs. De Peyster gazed wildly after him.  The plan “soaked in,” as he had said it would; and as it soaked in, her horror grew.  She saw herself becoming involved, helpless to prevent it, in the plan Mr. Pyecroft considered so delectable; she saw herself later publicly exposed as engaged in this scheme to defraud herself; she could hear all New York laughing.  Her whole being shivered and gasped.  Of all the plans ever proposed to a woman—!

And all the weeks and months this Mr. Pyecroft would be hovering about her!...

Despairingly she sat upright.

“Matilda, we can’t stay in the same house with that man.”

“Oh, ma’am,” breathed the appalled Matilda, “of course not!”

“We’ve got to leave!  And leave before he comes back!”

“Of course, ma’am,” cried Matilda.  And then:  “But—­but where?”