A colored maid who had omitted her collar dropped before Mrs. De Peyster a heavy saucer containing three shriveled black objects immured in a dark, forbidding liquor that suggested some wry tincture from a chemist’s shop.  In response to Mrs. De Peyster’s glance of shrinking inquiry Matilda whispered that they were prunes.  Next the casual-handed maid favored them with thin, underdone oatmeal, and with thin, bitter coffee; and last with two stacks of pancakes, which in hardly less substantial incarnation had previously been served them by every whiff of kitchen air.

While she pretended to eat this uneatable usurper of her dainty breakfasts, Mrs. De Peyster glanced furtively at the company.  Utterly common.  And with such she had to associate—­for months, perhaps!—­she who had mixed and mingled only with the earth’s best!

Mrs. Gilbert—­naturally Mrs. Gilbert was a widow—­did not give Mrs. De Peyster a second glance.  The other boarders, after their first scrutiny, hardly looked at her again.  The effect was as if all had turned their backs upon her.

Certainly this was odd behavior.

Then, in a flash, she understood.  They were snubbing her as a social inferior!

Mrs. De Peyster was beginning to flame when the clergyman they had glimpsed the night before entered and pronounced a sonorous good-morning, all-inclusive, as though intended for a congregation.  He seated himself at a small table just beyond Mrs. De Peyster’s and was unfolding his napkin when his eyes fell upon Mrs. De Peyster.  And then Mrs. De Peyster saw one of the oddest changes in a man’s face imaginable.  Mr. Pyecroft’s eyes, which had been large with benedictory roundness, flashed with a smile.  And then, at an instant’s end, his face was once more grave and clerically benign.

But that instant-long look made her shiver.  What was in this clergyman’s mind?  She watched him, in spite of herself—­strangely fascinated; stole looks at him during this meal, and the next, and when they passed upon the stairway.  He had a confusingly contradictory face, had the Reverend Herbert E. Pyecroft—­for such she learned was his full name; a face customarily sedate and elderish, and then, almost without perceptible change, for swift moments oddly youthful; with a wide mouth, which would suddenly twist up at its right corner as though from some unholy quip of humor, and whose as sudden straightening into a solemn line would show that the unseemly humor had been exorcised.  In manner he was bland, ornate, gestureish, ample; giving the sense that in nothing less commodious than a church could he loose his person and his powers to their full expression.  He was genially familiar; the church-man who is a good fellow.  Yet never did he let one forget the respect that was due his cloth.

He was at present without a charge, as she learned later.  It was understood that he was waiting an almost certain call from a church in Kansas City.