She had excluded Clementina on account of her youth, as she said to one of the fall and winter months, who came in late, and noticed Clementina’s absence with a “Hello!  Anything the matter with the Spirit of Summer?” Clementina had become both a pet and a joke with these months before the parade was over, and now they clamored together, and said they must have her at the dance anyway.  They were more tepidly seconded by the spring and summer months, and Mrs. Milray said, “Well, then, you’ll have to all subscribe and get her a pair of dancing slippers.”  They pressed her for her meaning, and she had to explain the fact of Clementina’s destitution, which that additional fold of cheese-cloth had hidden so well in the coaching tableau that it had never been suspected.  The young men entreated her to let them each buy a pair of slippers for the Spirit of Summer, which she should wear in turn for the dance that she must give each of them; and this made Mrs. Milray declare that, no, the child should not come to the dance at all, and that she was not going to have her spoiled.  But, before the party broke up, she promised that she would see what could be done, and she put it very prettily to the child the next day, and waited for her to say, as she knew she must, that she could not go, and why.  They agreed that the cheese-cloth draperies of the Spirit of Summer were surpassingly fit for the dance; but they had to agree that this still left the question of slippers untouched.  It remained even more hopeless when Clementina tried on all of Mrs. Milray’s festive shoes, and none of her razorpoints and high heels would avail.  She went away disappointed, but not yet disheartened; youth does not so easily renounce a pleasure pressed to the lips; and Clementina had it in her head to ask some of the table girls to help her out.  She meant to try first with that big girl who had helped her put on the shoeman’s bronze slippers; and she hurried through the office, pushing purblindly past Fane without looking his way, when he called to her in the deference which he now always used with her, “Here’s a package here for you, Clementina—­Miss Claxon,” and he gave her an oblong parcel, addressed in a hand strange to her.  “Who is it from?” she asked, innocently, and Fane replied with the same ingenuousness:  “I’m sure I don’t know.”  Afterwards he thought of having retorted, “I haven’t opened it,” but still without being certain that he would have had the courage to say it.

Clementina did not think of opening it herself, even when she was alone in her little room above Mrs. Atwell’s, until she had carefully felt it over, and ascertained that it was a box of pasteboard, three or four inches deep and wide, and eight or ten inches long.  She looked at the address again, “Miss Clementina Claxon,” and at the narrow notched ribbon which tied it, and noted that the paper it was wrapped in was very white and clean.  Then she sighed, and loosed the knot, and the paper slipped off the box, and at the same time the lid fell off, and the shoe man’s bronze slippers fell out upon the floor.