But what he had asked her to do had greatly surprised her. He had promised her twenty pounds if she would press her master’s little safe key into the tin matchbox filled with soft wax, and thus take an impression of it. Naturally she asked why. In reply he had explained that he and her master had, for years, been intimate friends, and that once in the club they had had a sharp discussion about safes and keys. Her master had declared that safe-makers made no two keys alike. And now he wanted to play a joke upon him and prove to him that they did.
They had been chatting it over all that evening. The plea was certainly a thin one, but to Lily Lawson in her frame of mind, and with a gentleman as her sweetheart, it sounded quite plausible.
“Of course, I rely upon you, Lily, never to give me away,” he laughed. “I want to win the bet, and I’ll give you half?”
“Of course I won’t,” she answered, as they still stood there, the clock striking ten. “But I really ought not to do it?”
“It isn’t difficult. You say that he often leaves his keys on his dressing-table, and you know the little one which unlocks the safe in the basement.”
“Yes. It’s quite a tiny key with the maker’s name along the barrel of it.”
“Then all you have to do is to press it well into the wax, and there’s fifteen pounds for you if you give the little box back to me to-morrow night. It’s so easy—and twenty pounds will certainly be of use to you, now that your poor mother is so ill.”
The girl wavered. The man saw it and cleverly put further pressure upon her, by suggesting that with the money she could send her mother away for a change.
“But is it really right?” she queried, raising her dark eyes to his.
“Of course it is. It’s only a joke, dear,” he laughed.