The child seemed anxious about something, and Mrs. Milray, who wanted to go and lie down, too, asked a little impatiently, “What is it, Clementina?”

“Oh, nothing.  Only I was afraid maybe you didn’t like my waving to the children, when you saw how queea they looked.”  Clementina’s lips quivered.

“Did any of the rest say anything?”

“I know what they thought.  But I don’t care!  I should do it right over again!”

Mrs. Milray’s happiness in the day’s triumph was so great that she could indulge a generous emotion.  She caught the girl in her arms.  “I want to kiss you; I want to hug you, Clementina!”

The notion of a dance for the following night to celebrate the success of the house in the coaching parade came to Mrs. Milray aver a welsh-rarebit which she gave at the close of the evening.  The party was in the charge of Gregory, who silently served them at their orgy with an austerity that might have conspired with the viand itself against their dreams, if they had not been so used to the gloom of his ministrations.  He would not allow the waitresses to be disturbed in their evening leisure, or kept from their sleep by such belated pleasures; and when he had provided the materials for the rarebit, he stood aloof, and left their combination to Mrs. Milray and her chafing-dish.

She had excluded Clementina on account of her youth, as she said to one of the fall and winter months, who came in late, and noticed Clementina’s absence with a “Hello!  Anything the matter with the Spirit of Summer?” Clementina had become both a pet and a joke with these months before the parade was over, and now they clamored together, and said they must have her at the dance anyway.  They were more tepidly seconded by the spring and summer months, and Mrs. Milray said, “Well, then, you’ll have to all subscribe and get her a pair of dancing slippers.”  They pressed her for her meaning, and she had to explain the fact of Clementina’s destitution, which that additional fold of cheese-cloth had hidden so well in the coaching tableau that it had never been suspected.  The young men entreated her to let them each buy a pair of slippers for the Spirit of Summer, which she should wear in turn for the dance that she must give each of them; and this made Mrs. Milray declare that, no, the child should not come to the dance at all, and that she was not going to have her spoiled.  But, before the party broke up, she promised that she would see what could be done, and she put it very prettily to the child the next day, and waited for her to say, as she knew she must, that she could not go, and why.  They agreed that the cheese-cloth draperies of the Spirit of Summer were surpassingly fit for the dance; but they had to agree that this still left the question of slippers untouched.  It remained even more hopeless when Clementina tried on all of Mrs. Milray’s festive shoes, and none of her razorpoints and high heels would avail.