as calmly
suggesting that he commit two felonies, little knowing that his score for
the day already aggregated three--purse-snatching, the theft of an
automobile from her own door, and what might very readily be construed as
the kidnaping of her own child!

"I don't know, miss," he said feebly, calculating that the sum total of
even minimum penalties for the five crimes would outrun his natural life
and consume an eternity of reincarnations.

"Of course it wouldn't be stealing in the ordinary sense," she explained.
"What I want you to do is to play the part of what we will call a
reversible Santa Claus, who takes things away from stupid people who don't
enjoy them anyhow. And maybe if they lost these things they'd behave
themselves. I could explain afterward that it was all my fault, and of
course I wouldn't let any harm come to _you_. I'd be responsible, and of
course I'd see you safely out of it; you would have to rely on me for
that. I'm trusting _you_ and you'd have to trust _me!_"

"Oh, I'd trust ye, miss! An' ef I was to get pinched I wouldn't never
squeal on ye. We don't never blab on a pal, miss!"

He was afraid she might resent being called a "pal," but his use of the
term apparently pleased her.

"We understand each other, then. It really won't be very difficult, for
papa's place is over on the Sound and Mr. Talbot's is right next to it, so
you wouldn't have far to go."

Her utter failure to comprehend the enormity of the thing she was
proposing affected him queerly. Even among hardened criminals in the
underworld such undertakings are suggested cautiously; but Muriel was
ordering a burglary as though it were a pound of butter or a dozen eggs!

"Father keeps his most valuable glazes in a safe in the pantry," she
resumed after a moment's reflection, "but I can give you the combination.
That will make it a lot easier."

The Hopper assented, with a pontifical nod, to this sanguine view of the
matter.

"Mr. Talbot keeps his finest pieces in a cabinet built into the
bookshelves in his library. It's on the left side as you stand in the
drawing-room door, and you look for the works of Thomas Carlyle. There's a
dozen or so volumes of Carlyle, only they're not books,--not really,--but
just the backs of books painted on the steel of a safe. And if you press a
spring in the upper right-hand corner of the shelf just over these books
the whole section swings out. I suppose you've seen that sort of
hiding-place f