“I do not understand what makes me think of that poor girl all the time,” mused Lynde one day, as he stood by the writing-table in his sitting-room.  “It can’t be this that keeps her in my mind.”

He took up a slipper which was lying on the table in the midst of carved pipes and paper-weights and odds and ends.  It was a very small slipper, nearly new, with high pointed heel and a square jet buckle at the instep:  evidently of foreign make, and cut after the arch pattern of the slippers we see peeping from the flowered brocade skirts of Sir Peter Lely’s full-length ladies.  It was such an absurd shoe, a toy shoe, a child might have worn it!

“It cannot be this,” said Lynde.

And yet it was that, more or less.  Lynde had taken the slipper from his valise the evening he got home, and set it on the corner of the desk, where it straightway made itself into a cunning ornament.  The next morning he put it into one of the drawers; but the table looked so barren and commonplace without it that presently the thing was back again.  There it had remained ever since.

It met his eye every morning when he opened the door of his bedroom; it was there when he came home late at night, and seemed to be sitting up for him, in the reproachful, feminine fashion.  When he was writing his letters, there it was, with a prim, furtive air of looking on.  It was not like a mere slipper; it had traits and an individuality of its own; there were moments when the jet beads in the buckle sparkled with a sort of intelligence.  Sitting at night, reading under the drop-light, Lynde often had an odd sensation as if the little shoe would presently come tripping across the green table-cloth towards him.  He had a hundred fanciful humors growing out of that slipper.  Sometimes he was tempted to lock it up or throw it away.  Sometimes he would say to himself, half mockingly and half sadly, “That is your wife’s slipper;” then he would turn wholly sad, thinking how tragic that would be if it were really so.

It was a part of the girl’s self; it had borne her lovely weight; it still held the impress of her foot; it would not let Lynde entirely forget her while it was under his eyes.

The slipper had stood on the writing-table four or five months—­an object of consuming curiosity and speculation to the young woman who dusted Lynde’s chambers—­when an incident occurred which finally led to its banishment.

Lynde never had visitors; there were few men of his age in the town, and none was sufficiently intimate with him to come to his rooms; but it chanced one evening that a young man named Preston dropped in to smoke a cigar with Lynde.  Preston had recently returned from abroad, where he had been an attache of the American Legation at London, and was now generally regarded as the prospective proprietor of Miss Mildred.  He was an entertaining, mercurial young fellow, into whose acquaintanceship Lynde had fallen at the Bowlsbys’.