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.

Either it must be a dream or it must be a joke; it could not be both real and earnest; somebody was trying to tease her; such flattery of fortune could not be honestly meant.  But it went to her head, and she was so giddy with it as she caught the slippers from the floor, and ran down to Mrs. Atwell, that she knocked against the sides of the narrow staircase.

“What is it?  What does it mean?  Who did it?” she panted, with the slippers in her hand.  “Whe’e did they come from?” She poured out the history of her trying on these shoes, and of her present need of them and of their mysterious coming, to meet her longing after it had almost ceased to be a hope.  Mrs. Atwell closed with her in an exultation hardly short of a clapping the hands.  Her hair was gray, and the girl’s hair still hung in braids down her back, but they were of the same age in their transport, which they referred to Mrs. Milray, and joined with her in glad but fruitless wonder who had sent Clementina the shoes.  Mrs. Atwell held that the help who had seen the girl trying them on had clubbed together and got them for her at the time; and had now given them to her for the honor she had done the Middlemount House in the parade.  Mrs. Milray argued that the spring and summer months had secretly dispatched some fall and winter month to ransack the stores at Middlemount Centre for them.  Clementina believed that they came from the shoe man himself, who had always wanted to send them, in the hope that she would keep them, and had merely happened to send them just then in that moment of extremity when she was helpless against them.  Each conjecture involved improbabilities so gross that it left the field free to any opposite theory.