ave 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.

Here was a crisis that had to be faced at once. Up in their room they
discussed finance, going over and over their predicament, for two
hours. There seemed no practical solution.

A heavy rain had begun to fall. The night was hot, close. The
unaccustomed high collar of Matilda's dress had seemed suffocating to
Mrs. De