“I can’t wear the butterfly, Martha dear,” she said.

“Why can’t you?”

“Well, now please, please don’t worry, but I can’t wear it, because I can’t find it.  I dare say it’ll turn up some day when I least expect, but just now, it seems to be lost.”

Martha looked grave.  “It come out o’ the wash all right, didn’t it?” she inquired anxiously.  “I remember distinkly leavin’ it soak in the suds, so’s there wouldn’t be no strain-like, rubbin’ it, an’ the dust’d just drop out natural.  But now I come to think of it, I don’t recklect ironin’ it.  Now honest, did it come outer the wash, Miss Claire?”

“No, Martha—­but—­”

“There ain’t no but about it.  I musta gone an’ lost your pretty lace for you, an’ it was reel at that!”

“Never mind!  It’s of no consequence.  Truly, please don’t—­”

“Worry?  Shoor I won’t worry.  What’s the use worryin’?  But I’ll make it right, you betcher life, which is much more to the purpose.  Say, I shouldn’t wonder but it got into the tub someways, an’ then, when I let the water out, the suckage drew it down the pipe.  Believe me, that’s the very thing that happened, and—­’I’ll never see sweet Annie any more!’”

“It doesn’t make a particle of difference, Martha.  I never liked that butterfly as much as you did, you know.”

“Perhaps you did an’ perhaps you didn’t, but all the same you’re out a neck-fixin’, an’ it’s my fault, an’ so you’re bound to let me get square, to save my face, Miss Claire.  You see how it is, don’t you?  Well, last Christmas, Mrs. Granville she give me a lace jabbow—­reel Irish mull an’ Carrickmacross (that’s lace from the old country, as you know as well as me).  She told me all about it.  Fine?  It’d break your heart to think o’ one o’ them poor innercent colleens over there pricklin’ her eyes out, makin’ such grandjer for the like o’ me, when no doubt she thought she was doin’ it for some great dame, would be sportin’ it out loud, in her auta on Fifth Avenoo.  What use have I, in my business, for that kinder decoration, I should like to know!  It’d only be distractin’ me, gettin’ in me pails when I’m scrubbin’.  An’ by the time Cora an’ Francie is grown up, jabbows will be out.  I’d much more use for the five-dollar-bill was folded up in the box alongside. That, now, was becomin’ to my peculiar style o’ beauty.  But the jabbow!  There ain’t no use talkin’, Miss Claire, you’ll have to take it off’n my hands, I mean my chest, an’ then we’ll be quits on the butterfly business, an’ no thanks to your nose on either side.”

It was useless to protest.

The next morning when Claire started forth to beard the lioness in her den, she was tricked out in all the bravery of Martha’s really beautiful “jabbow,” and looked “as pretty as a picture, an’ then some,” as Mrs. Slawson confidentially assured Sam.

But the heart beneath the frilly lace and mull was anything but brave.  It felt, in fact, quite as white and fluttery as the jabbow looked, and when Claire found herself being actually ushered into the boudoir of the august presence, and told to “wait please,” she thought it would stop altogether for very abject fright.