confide it to either, since he felt it would be vain to attempt to
explain the sombre effect which the whole affair had had on him.

"I do not understand what makes me think of that poor girl all the
time," mused Lynde one day, as he stood by the writing-table in his
sitting-room. "It can't be this that keeps her in my mind."

He took up a slipper which was lying on the table in the midst of carved
pipes and paper-weights and odds and ends. It was a very small slipper,
nearly new, with high pointed heel and a square jet buckle at the
instep: evidently of foreign make, and cut after the arch pattern of the
slippers we see peeping from the flowered brocade skirts of Sir Peter
Lely's full-length ladies. It was such an absurd shoe, a toy shoe, a
child might have worn it!

"It cannot be this," said Lynde.

And yet it was that, more or less. Lynde had taken the slipper from his
valise the evening he got home, and set it on the corner of the desk,
where it straightway made itself into a cunning ornament. The next
morning he put it into one of the drawers; but the table looked so
barren and commonplace without it that presently the thing was back
again. There it had remained ever since.

It met his eye every morning when he opened the door of his bedroom; it
was there when he came home late at night, and seemed to be sitting up
for him, in the reproachful, feminine fashion. When he was writing his
letters, there it was, with a prim, furtive air of looking on. It was
not like a mere slipper; it had traits and an individuality of its own;
there were moments when the jet beads in the buckle sparkled with a sort