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 ...