"Very well. Now the deposit--how much can you pay?" "Ah--er--say fifteen dollars?" Mrs. Gilbert's hands that tried to seem indifferent to money and that yet were remarkably prompt, took the bills Matilda held out and thrust them into the folds of her voluminous gown. "Thank you. Breakfast Sunday mornings from eight to ten. Good-night." And with that her large pink-tinted ladyship made a rustling exit. Mrs. De Peyster sank overcome into a chair, drew up her veil, and gazed about her. The other of Mrs. Gilbert's "easy"-chairs had a seat of faded and frayed cotton tapestry; there was a lumpy and unstable-looking couch; a yellow washstand with dandruffy varnish and cracked mirror; wall-paper with vast, uncataloguable flowers gangrenous in suggestion; on the ceiling a circle of over-plump dancing Cupids; and over against one wall a huge, broad, dark box that to Mrs. De Peyster's amazed vision suggested an upended coffin, contrived for the comfort of some deceased with remarkable width of shoulder. "Matilda!" she shiveringingly ejaculated. "I didn't know there was anything like it in the world!" "I know, ma'am, that it's not fit for you," grieved Matilda. "But--it's better than nothing." "And that thing there!" pointing a shaking finger at the abnormal coffin. "What's that?" "That's your bed, ma'am." "My bed!" "It lets down, ma'am. Like this." Whereupon Matilda proceeded to let down that _sine qua non_ of a profitable boarding-house, while Mrs. De Peyster, dismayed, looked for the first time in her life upon the miracle of the unfolding of a folding-bed. Her mistress's slumber prepared for Matilda then softened the inaccuracies of the couch's surface for her own more humble repose. Neither felt like talking; there was too much to talk about. So soon both were in their beds, the lights out. Mrs. De Peyster lay dazed upon this strange bed that operated like a lorgnette: tremulously existing, awake, yet hardly capable of coherent thought. For a space she heard Matilda toss about, draw long, tremulous breaths; then from the couch of that elderly virgin sounded the incontrovertible tocsin of deep sleep. But for Mrs. De Peyster there was no sleep; not yet. She now was thinking; casting up accounts. Exactly twenty-four hours since, she had officially sailed. Jack and that Mary person were now in sweet and undisturbed possession of her house; Olivetta, on board the Plutonia, was this minute reposing at ease amid the luxuries of her _cabin de luxe_; and she, herself, Mrs. De Peyster, was lying on a folding-bed, a most knobby bed,--the man who invented cobblestone paving must have got his idea from such a bed as this,--in a boarding-house the like of which till this night she had never imagined to exist. And only twenty-four hours!... She stared up toward where, in the dark, the corpulent Cupids were dancing their aerial May-ring ... and stared ... and stared.... CHAPTER X PEACE--OF A SORT