Her eyes wandered up to the original, which was dimly illumined by the rays of her one candle.  What poise, what breeding, what calm, imperturbable dignity!  Then her gaze came back to her be-crumbed tea-table, with the kitchen knife and the raggedly gaping can.  She slipped rather limply down in her chair and covered her eyes.

A day passed—­and another—­and another.  Outside Mrs. De Peyster’s suite these days flew by with honeymoon rapidity; within, they lingered, and clung on, and seemed determined never to go, as is time’s malevolent practice with those imprisoned.  Mrs. De Peyster could hear Mary practicing, and practicing hard—­and, yes, brilliantly.  As for Jack, Matilda told her on her later visits—­and her later bundles contained a larger and more palatable supply of food than had the first package—­Matilda said that Jack, too, was working hard.  Furthermore, Matilda admitted, the pair were having the jolliest of honeymoons.

And a further thing Matilda told on her third furtive, after-midnight visit.  This concerned Mr. Pyecroft.  Mr. Pyecroft, it seemed, was becoming an even greater favorite with Jack and Mary—­particularly with Mary.  He had confided to them that he was weary of his escapades, and wanted to settle down; in fact, there was a girl—­the nicest girl in the world, begging Mary’s pardon—­who had promised to marry him as soon as he had become launched in honorable work.  The trouble was, he knew that no business man would employ him in a responsible capacity, and so his last departures from strict rectitude had been for the purpose of securing the capital to set himself up in some small but independent way.

His story, Matilda admitted, had captured Mary’s heart.

Judge Harvey, however, still smarting under his indignity, would on his evening calls scarcely speak to Mr. Pyecroft.  Nonetheless, Mr. Pyecroft had continued regretful and polite.  Once or twice, Judge Harvey, forgetting his resentment, had been drawn into discussions of points of law with Mr. Pyecroft.  To Matilda, who, of course, knew nothing about law, it had seemed that Mr. Pyecroft talked almost as well as the Judge himself.  But the Judge, the instant he remembered himself, resumed his ire toward Mr. Pyecroft.

Thus three days, in which it seemed to Mrs. De Peyster that Time stood still and taunted her,—­each day exactly like the day before, a day of half starvation, of tiptoed, breathless routine,—­days in which she spoke not a word save a whisper or two at midnight at the food-bearing visit of the sad-visaged Matilda,—­three dull, diabolic days dragged by their interminable length of hours.  Such days!—­such awful, awful days!

On Matilda’s fourth visit with her usual bundle of pilferings from the pantry, Mrs. De Peyster observed in the manner of that disconsolate pirate a great deal of suppressed agitation—­of a sort hardly ascribable to the danger of their situation:  an agitation quite different from mere nervous fear.  There were traces of recent crying in Matilda’s face, and now and then she had difficulty in holding down a sob.  Mrs. De Peyster pressed her as to the trouble; Matilda chokingly replied that there was nothing.  Mrs. De Peyster persisted, and soon Matilda was weeping openly.