The real Matilda! Mrs. De Peyster's ears, at that moment frantically acute, registered dim movements of Matilda overhead.
Suppose the real Matilda should hear their voices; suppose she should come walking down into the scene! With two Matildas simultaneously upon the stage--
Mrs. De Peyster reached out and clutched the banister of the stairway with drowning hands.
The pair talked on to her, answering themselves. They would take the rooms above Mrs. De Peyster's suite, they said--they would give her, Matilda, no trouble at all--they would attend to their own housework, everything--and so on, and so on, with Mrs. De Peyster hearing nothing, but reaching aurally out for Matilda's exposing tread. To forestall this exposure, she started weakly up the stairs, only to be halted by the slipping of Jack's arm around her shoulder. The couple chattered on about their household arrangements, and Mrs. De Peyster the prisoner of Jack's affectionate arm, stood gulping, as though her soul were trying to swallow itself, ready to sink through her floor at the faintest approach of her housekeeper's slippers.
And then again the arm of the exuberant Jack tightened about her. "Oh, say, what a wild old time we're going to have! Won't we, Matilda?"
"Ye--yes," Mrs. De Peyster felt constrained to answer.
"But it's mighty dangerous!" cried the little figure, with a shivery laugh.
"Dangerous!" chuckled Jack with his mischievous glee. "Well, rather! And that's half the fun. If the newspapers were to get on to the fact that the son of _the_ Mrs. De Peyster had secretly married without his mother's knowledge, and that the young scamp and his wife were secretly living in her house--can't you just see the reporters jimmying open every window to get at us!"
"Really, Jack," protested the girlish voice, "I think it's scandalous of us to be doing this!"
"Come, now, Mary, nobody's going to be any the worse, or any the wiser, for it. We're just using something that would otherwise be wasted--and we'll vanish at the first news that mother's coming back. But, of course, Matilda, we've certainly got to be all-fired careful. I'll leave the house only in the early mornings--by the back way--through Washington Mews--either when the coast is clear or there's a crowd. There are so many artists and chauffeurs and stablemen coming and going through the Mews that I'm sure I can manage it without being noticed. And I'll come back in the same way; and our food I'll smuggle in of nights."