She began wheeling her chair across the room, but the next moment Punch had turned the handle and pulled the great door open. “Why, Gran,” he cried, horrified, “it wasn’t locked!” The pearls, like all the other contents of the irregularly shelved, cubby-holed place, were safe all right, and as soon as this had been discovered to be a fact, the old lady tried hard to convince her grandson that she had known that it was unlocked all the time. But he knew that for a minute she had been absolutely incapacitated by terror, and the look in her withered old face was one that he didn’t like to remember. She had simply forgotten to lock the safe the last time she’d gone to it. She was too badly shaken to do anything for herself. Even after he’d found the long morocco covered box in the place she’d indicated, she was too weak to press the spring that released the lid. Punch found the pearls rather disappointing. They were beautiful, of course. Big and round and handsome, and rather nice to touch. But as anything to commit a crime for, or to pay a fortune for, he couldn’t see it. He was too polite to express these opinions to his grandmother, who he perceived was deeply moved by the sight of the thing. She told him a long history of the necklace, the occasion of his grandfather’s buying it, and the admiration it had excited on various memorable occasions. “Are you really going to give it to Judy?” he asked. “What’s that about Judy?” she demanded. She wasn’t deaf a bit, he was sure, but she often asked to have things repeated. His theory of this was that it gave her more time to decide what she wanted to say. “It was in the paper yesterday,” he explained, “that you were going to give the necklace to Judy for a wedding present.” He extricated from his pocket the same damp wad of paper he had offered for my inspection that morning. She didn’t pretend to read it, though. Her vision wasn’t nearly so good as her hearing, and without her spectacles, which she hated to wear, she couldn’t read at all. “So they had it in the paper, did they?” she remarked. “Well, it’s an amazing thing how much these newspaper reporters know. What has Judy got to say about it?” “She hasn’t said anything to me,” Punch told her. “How about your mother? I dare say she had some ideas on the subject.” “I haven’t seen mother,” Punch pointed out to her, “since she went to town with Judy last week. But what I thought was that as long as it _did_ come out in the paper, it would be better to hide these where no one would think of looking for them, instead of leaving them in the safe, which is the first place where any one would look. Especially while there are so many people we don’t know around the house. I _know_ I could hide them, Gran, where they’d be safe.” He had an idea that she was considering the proposal favorably. At any rate she didn’t at once decline it. But in the middle of the silence there came a light tap on the door.