“Will you want them back?  It’s awful cold down at the harbour mouth—­long after it’s warm up here,” said Lida slyly.

“No, you’re to keep them, of course.  That is what I meant when I gave them.  I have another pair of shoes and plenty of stockings.”

Lida had meant to stay awhile and talk to the girls about many things.  But now she thought she had better get away before somebody came and made her yield up her booty.  So she shuffled off through the bitter twilight, in the noiseless, shadowy way she had slipped in.  As soon as she was out of sight of the manse she sat down, took off the shoes and stockings, and put them in her herring basket.  She had no intention of keeping them on down that dirty harbour road.  They were to be kept good for gala occasions.  Not another little girl down at the harbour mouth had such fine black cashmere stockings and such smart, almost new shoes.  Lida was furnished forth for the summer.  She had no qualms in the matter.  In her eyes the manse people were quite fabulously rich, and no doubt those girls had slathers of shoes and stockings.  Then Lida ran down to the Glen village and played for an hour with the boys before Mr. Flagg’s store, splashing about in a pool of slush with the maddest of them, until Mrs. Elliott came along and bade her begone home.

“I don’t think, Faith, that you should have done that,” said Una, a little reproachfully, after Lida had gone.  “You’ll have to wear your good boots every day now and they’ll soon scuff out.”

“I don’t care,” cried Faith, still in the fine glow of having done a kindness to a fellow creature.  “It isn’t fair that I should have two pairs of shoes and poor little Lida Marsh not have any.  Now we both have a pair.  You know perfectly well, Una, that father said in his sermon last Sunday that there was no real happiness in getting or having—­only in giving.  And it’s true.  I feel far happier now than I ever did in my whole life before.  Just think of Lida walking home this very minute with her poor little feet all nice and warm and comfy.”

“You know you haven’t another pair of black cashmere stockings,” said Una.  “Your other pair were so full of holes that Aunt Martha said she couldn’t darn them any more and she cut the legs up for stove dusters.  You’ve nothing but those two pairs of striped stockings you hate so.”

All the glow and uplift went out of Faith.  Her gladness collapsed like a pricked balloon.  She sat for a few dismal minutes in silence, facing the consequences of her rash act.

“Oh, Una, I never thought of that,” she said dolefully.  “I didn’t stop to think at all.”

The striped stockings were thick, heavy, coarse, ribbed stockings of blue and red which Aunt Martha had knit for Faith in the winter.  They were undoubtedly hideous.  Faith loathed them as she had never loathed anything before.  Wear them she certainly would not.  They were still unworn in her bureau drawer.