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.

Rumor of the fact could not fail to go through the house, and long before his day’s work was done it reached the chef, and amused him as a piece of the Boss’s luck.  He was smoking his evening pipe at the kitchen door after supper, when Clementina passed him on one of the many errands that took her between Mrs. Milray’s room and her own, and he called to her:  “Boss, what’s this I hear about a pair o’ glass slippas droppin’ out the sky int’ youa lap?”

Clementina was so happy that she thought she might trust him for once, and she said, “Oh, yes, Mr. Mahtin!  Who do you suppose sent them?” she entreated him so sweetly that it would have softened any heart but the heart of a tease.

“I believe I could give a pootty good guess if I had the facts.”

Clementina innocently gave them to him, and he listened with a well-affected sympathy.

“Say Fane fust told you about ’em?”

“Yes.  ‘He’e’s a package for you,’ he said.  Just that way; and he couldn’t tell me who left it, or anything.”

“Anybody asked him about it since?”

“Oh, yes!  Mrs. Milray, and Mrs. Atwell, and Mr. Atwell, and everybody.”

“Everybody.”  The chef smiled with a peculiar droop of one eye.  “And he didn’t know when the slippas got into the landlo’d’s box?”