But on Thursday, locked in their room, they spoke of the matter openly.

“Please, ma’am,” said Matilda, who had been maturing a plan, “you might make out a check to me, dated last week, before you sailed, and I could get it cashed.  They’d think it was for back wages.”

“I told you last Friday, when everything happened, that I had drawn out my balance.”

“But your bank won’t mind your overdrawing for a hundred or two,” urged Matilda.

“That,” said Mrs. De Peyster with an air of noble principle, “is a thing I will not do.”

Matilda knew nothing of the secret of Mrs. De Peyster’s exhausted credit at her bank.

“My own money,” Matilda remarked plaintively, “is all in a savings bank.  I have to give thirty days’ notice before I can draw a penny.”

There was a brief silence.  Matilda’s gaze, which had several times wandered to a point a few inches below Mrs. De Peyster’s throat, now fixed themselves upon this spot.  She spoke hesitantly.

“There’s your pearl pendant you forgot and kept on when you put on my dress to go out riding with William.”  It was not one of the world’s famous jewels; yet was of sufficient importance to be known, in a limited circle, as “The De Peyster Pearl.”  “I know the chain wouldn’t bring much; but you could raise a lot on the pearl from a pawnbroker.”

Mrs. De Peyster tried to look shocked.  “What!  I take my pearl to a pawnbroker!”

“Of course, I wouldn’t expect you to go to a pawnshop, ma’am,” Matilda apologized.  “I’d take it.”

Mrs. De Peyster had a moment’s picture of Matilda’s laying the pearl before a pawnbroker and asking for a fraction of its worth, a mere thousand or two; and of the hard-eyed usurer glancing at it, announcing that the pearl was spoof, and offering fifty cents upon it.

“Matilda, you should know that I would not part with such an heirloom,” she said rebukingly.

“But, ma’am, in a crisis like this—­”

“That will do, Matilda!”

Matilda said no more about the pearl then.  She went to her bank and gave due notice of her desire to withdraw her funds.  That, however, was provision merely for the next month and thereafter.  It did not help to-day.

But all the rest of that day, and all of the following, Mrs. De Peyster felt Matilda’s eyes, aggrieved, bitterly resentful, upon the spot where beneath her black housekeeper’s dress hung the pearl she was unwilling to pawn to save them.

It was most uncomfortable.

CHAPTER XI

THE REVEREND MR. PYECROFT

The next evening, Friday, as they left the dining-room, draped with the heavy odor of a dark, mysterious viand which Matilda in a whisper had informed Mrs. De Peyster to be pot-roast, Mrs. Gilbert stopped them on the stairs.  In her most casual, superior tone, she notified Mrs. De Peyster that she would thank them for another week’s pay in advance the following day, or their room.