As Mrs. De Peyster came out of her room that first Sunday at supper-time, there emerged from the room in front of hers the Reverend Mr. Pyecroft.  He held out his hand, and smiled parochially.

“Ah, Miss Thompson,”—­that was the name she had given the landlady,—­“since we are neighbors we should also be friends.”  And on he went, voluminously, in his full, upholstered voice.

Somehow Mrs. De Peyster got away from him.  But thereafter he spoke to her whenever he could waylay her in the hallway or upon the stairs.  And his attentions did not stop with words.  Flowers, even edibles, were continuously found against her door, his card among them.  The situation somehow recalled to her the queer gentleman in shorts who threw vegetables over Mrs. Nickleby’s garden wall.  Mrs. De Peyster felt outraged; she fumed; yet she dared not be outspokenly resentful.

She had at first no inkling of the meaning of these attentions.  It was Matilda who suggested the dismaying possibility.

“Don’t you think, ma’am, he’s trying to make love to you?”

“Make love to me!” rising in horror from one of Mrs. Gilbert’s veteran “easy"-chairs.

“I’m sure it’s that, ma’am,” said the troubled Matilda.

“Matilda!  Of all the effrontery!”

“Indeed, it is an insult to you, ma’am.  But that may not be the worst of it.  For if he really falls in love with you, he may try to follow you when you get ready to leave.”

“Matilda!” gasped Mrs. De Peyster.

Thereafter, whenever he tried to speak to her in the hallways she shrank from him in both fear and indignation.  But her rebuffs did not lessen by one ray the smiling amicability of his bland countenance He tried to become confidential, tried to press toward intimacy; one evening he even had the unbelievable audacity to ask if he might call upon her!  She flamed with the desire to destroy him with a look, a word; Mrs. De Peyster knew well how thus to snuff out presuming upstarts.  But caution warned her that she dared not unloose her powers.  So she merely turned and fled, choking.

But the reverend gentleman’s unperturbed overtures continued.

Mrs. De Peyster and Matilda did not speak of money at first; but it was constantly in both their minds as a problem of foremost importance.  Their failure to buy fresh outfits, as they had told Mrs. Gilbert they intended doing, thus supplying “baggage” that would be security for their board, caused Mrs. Gilbert to regard them with hostile suspicion.  Matilda saw eviction in their landlady’s penciled eyes, and without a word as to her intention to Mrs. De Peyster, she slipped out on the third day, returned minus her two rings, and handed Mrs. Gilbert ten dollars.

They were secure to the week’s end.  After that—?

Fitfully Mrs. De Peyster pondered this matter of finances.  She had money so near, yet utterly unreachable.  Her house was filled with negotiable wealth, but she dared not go near it.  Judge Harvey would secure her money gladly; but if the previous Friday she could not accept his aid, then a thousand times less could she accept it now.  To ask his aid would be to reveal, not alone her presence in America, but the series of undignified experiences which had involved her deeper and deeper.  That humiliation was unthinkable.