if small sums like a hundred thousand pounds are carried
about in the pocket.

"Good gracious! And you've got two hundred of it already, haven't
you?"

"Yes, but what is two hundred out of a hundred and twenty thousand? A
hundred and twenty thousand! There's spending in it, isn't there,
Lotty? Gad, we'll make the money spin, I calculate! It may be a few
weeks before the old lady transfers the money--I don't quite know
where it is, but in stocks or something--to your name. As soon as it
is in your name I've got a plan. We'll remember that you've got a
sweetheart or something in America, and you'll break your heart for
wanting to see him. And then nothing will do but you must run across
for a trip. Oh, I'll manage, and we'll make the money fly."

He was always adding new details to his story, finding something to
embellish it and heighten the effect, and now having succeeded in
getting the false Iris into the house, he began already to devise
schemes to get her out again.

"A hundred thousand pounds? Why, Joe, it is a terrible great sum of
money. Good gracious! What shall we do with it, when we get it?"

"I'll show you what to do with it, my girl."

"And you said, Joe--you declared that it is your own by rights."

"Certainly it is my own. It would have been bequeathed to me by my own
cousin. But she didn't know it. And she died without knowing it, and I
am her heir."

Lotty wondered vaguely and rather sadly how much of this statement was
true. But she did not dare to ask. She had promised her assistance.
Every night she woke with a dreadful dream of a policeman knocking at
the door; whenever she saw a man in blue she trembled; and she knew
perfectly well that, if the plot failed, it was she herself, in all
probability, and not her husband at all, who would be put in the dock.
She did not believe a word about the cousin; she knew she was going to
do a vile and dreadful wickedness, but she was ready to go through
with it, or with anything else, to pleasure a husband who already, the
honeymoon hardly finished, showed the propensities of a rover.

"Very well, Lotty; we are going there at once. You need take nothing
with you, but you won't come back here for a good spell. In fact, I
think I shall have to give up these lodgings, for fear of accidents. I
shall leave you with your cousin."

"Yes; and I'm to be quiet, and behave pretty, I suppose?"

"You'll be just as quiet and demure as you used to be when you were