“When the man showed me the note, I tried to put him off; but he simply wouldn’t go and he followed me in.  His orders, he said.  I showed the letter to Mary and Mr. Pyecroft.  The man saw them.  They said call up Judge Harvey and ask him what to do.  I did and Judge Harvey came down and he examined the letter and said it was undoubtedly written by Mrs. De Peyster.  And he called up the Tiffany Studios, and they said they’d had such a telephone order from Mrs. De Peyster.”

“Jack and I never dreamed that his mother might have left orders to have people in here to renovate the house!” cried Mary in dismay.

“Then—­then Judge Harvey asked the man to put off the work,” Matilda went on.  “The man was very polite, but he said his orders from Mrs. De Peyster had been strict, and if he wasn’t allowed to go on with the work, he said, in order to protect himself, he’d have to cable Mrs. De Peyster that the people occupying her house wouldn’t let him.  Judge Harvey didn’t want Mrs. De Peyster to find out about Mr. and Mrs. Jack, so he told the man to go ahead.”

“And the man?” breathed Mrs. De Peyster.  “Where is he?”

“He’s down in the drawing-room, beginning on the tables.”

“It seems to me,” suggested Mr. Pyecroft, “that since this summer hotel is filling so rapidly, we might as well withdraw our advertisements from the papers.”

“I wonder, ma’—­” Matilda checked herself just in time.  “I wonder, Angelica,” she exclaimed desperately, “who it’ll be next?”

“Isn’t it simply awful!” cried Mary.  “But Jack’s gone into hiding and isn’t going to stir—­and the man didn’t see him—­and I’m your niece, you know.  So Jack and I are in no danger.  Anyhow, Judge Harvey gave the man a—­a large fee not to mention any one being in the house besides Matilda, and the man promised.  So I guess all of us are safe.”

But no such sentiment of security comforted Mrs. De Peyster.

Who was the man?

What was he here for?

One thing was certain:  he and those behind him had made clever and adequate preparations for his admission.  And she dared not expose him, and order him out—­for only that very morning she had left Paris on her motor trip!  She could only lie on the second maid’s narrow bed and await developments.

Matilda went out to attend to her domestic duties below; Mr. Pyecroft withdrew; and Mary, the sympathetic Mary,—­Mary who had no worry, for the cabinet-maker below would in due time complete his routine work and take himself away,—­Mary remained behind to apply to the invalid the soothing mental poultice of “Wormwood.”  But “Wormwood” did not torment Mrs. De Peyster as it had done in the forenoon.  She did not hear it.  She was thinking of the cabinet-maker below.  But Mary faithfully continued; she did not cease when Mr. Pyecroft reentered.  There was a slightly amused look in that gentleman’s face, but he said nothing, and seated himself on the foot of the bed and gazed thoughtfully at the wall of scaling kalsomine—­and Mary’s loudly pitched voice went on, and on, and on.