Here she sank down on a chair for one moment in utter collapse.  Then she looked up, resolutely steadying her voice: 

“Could anything on earth more awful have happened to a girl?” she asked, lips quivering in spite of her.  She stretched out what had once been a pair of white gloves, she looked down at what had been a delicate summer gown of white.  “How,” she asked with terrible calmness, “am I to get to Oyster Bay?”

He dropped on to a kitchen chair opposite her, clasping his coal-stained hands between his knees, utterly incapable of speech.

She looked at her shoes—­once snowy white; with a shudder she stripped the soiled gloves from elbow to wrist and flung them aside.  Her arms and hands formed a starling contrast to the remainder of the ensemble.

“What,” she asked, “am I to do?”

“The thing to do,” he said, “is to telephone to your family at Oyster Bay.”

“The telephone has been disconnected.  So has the water—­we can’t even w-wash our hands!” she faltered.

He said:  “I can go out and telephone to your family to send a maid with some clothes for you—­if you don’t mind being left alone in an empty house for a little while.”

“No, I don’t; but,” she gazed uncertainly at the black opening of the cellar, “but, please, don’t be gone very long, will you?”

He promised fervidly.  She gave him the number and her family’s name, and he left by the basement door.

He was gone a long time, during which, for a while, she paced the floor, unaffectedly wringing her hands and contemplating herself and her garments in the laundry looking-glass.

At intervals she tried to turn on the water, hoping for a few drops at least; at intervals she sat down to wait for him; then, the inaction becoming unendurable, musing goaded her into motion, and she ascended to the floor above, groping through the dimness in futile search for Clarence.  She heard him somewhere in obscurity, scurrying under furniture at her approach, evidently too thoroughly demoralized to recognize her voice.  So, after a while, she gave it up and wandered down to the pantry, instinct leading her, for she was hungry and thirsty; but she knew there could be nothing eatable in a house closed for the summer.

She lifted the pantry window and opened the blinds; noon sunshine flooded the place, and she began opening cupboards and refrigerators, growing hungrier every moment.

Then her eyes fell upon dozens of bottles of Apollinaris, and with a little cry of delight she knelt down, gathered up all she could carry, and ran upstairs to the bathroom adjoining her own bedchamber.

“At least,” she said to herself, “I can cleanse myself of this dreadful coal!” and in a few moments she was reveling, elbow deep, in a marble basin brimming with Apollinaris.

As the stain of the coal disappeared she remembered a rose-colored morning gown reposing in her bedroom clothespress; and she found more than that there—­rose stockings and slippers and a fragrant pile of exquisitely fine and more intimate garments, so tempting in their freshness that she hurried with them into the dressing room; then began to make rapid journeys up and downstairs, carrying dozens of quarts of Apollinaris to the big porcelain tub, into which she emptied them, talking happily to herself all the time.