“There is no one like you, Daddy,” she had told him, “to enjoy things.”  And so it had come about that he had pushed away his work on certain nights and, sitting beside her, had forgotten the sordid and suffering world which he knew so well, and which she knew not at all.

As her eyes swept the house, they rested at last with a rather puzzled look on a stout old gentleman with a wide shirt-front, who sat in the right-hand box.  He had white hair and a red face.

Where had she seen him?

There were women in the box, a sparkling company in white and silver, and black and diamonds, and green and gold.  There was a big bald-headed man, and quite in the shadow back of them all, a slender youth.

It was when the slender youth leaned forward to speak to the vision in white and silver that Jean stared and stared again.

She knew now where she had seen the old gentleman with the wide shirt front.  He was the shabby old gentleman of the Toy Shop!  And the youth was the shabby son!

Yet here they were in state and elegance!  As if a fairy godmother had waved a wand—!

The curtain went up on a feverish little slavey with her mind set on going to the ball, on Our Policeman wanting a shave, on the orphans in boxes, on baked potato offered as hospitality by a half-starved hostess, on a waiting Cinderella asleep on a frozen doorstep.

And then the ball—­and Mona Lisa, and the Duchess of Devonshire, and The Girl with the Pitcher and the Girl with the Muff—­and Cinderella in azure tulle and cloth-of-gold, dancing with the Prince at the end like mad—.

Then the bell boomed—­the lights went out—­and after a little moment, one saw Cinderella, stripped of her finery, staggering up the stairs.

Jean cried and laughed, and cried again.  Yet even in the midst of her emotion, she found her eyes pulled away from that appealing figure on the stage to those faintly illumined figures in the box.

When the curtain went down, her father, most surprisingly, bowed to the old gentleman and received in return a genial nod.

“Oh, do you know him?” she demanded.

“Yes.  It is General Drake.”

“Who are the others?”

“I am not sure about the women.  The boy in the back of the box is his son, DeRhymer Drake.”

Derry!

“Oh,”—­she had a feeling that she was not being quite candid with her father—­“he’s rather swank, isn’t he, Daddy?”

“Heavens, what slang!  I don’t see where you get it.  He is rich, if that’s what you mean, and it’s a wonder he isn’t spoiled to death.  His mother is dead, and the General is his own worst enemy; eats and drinks too much, and thinks he can get away with it.”

“Are they very rich—?”

“Millions, with only Derry to leave it to.  He’s the child of a second wife.”

Oh, lovely, lovely, lovely Cinderella, could your godmother do more than this?  To endow two rained-on and shabby gentlemen with pomp and circumstance!