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.