dancers as they
issued from the ball room and began to disperse about the halls and
verandas, and presently to call good night to one another. Then she
lighted her lamp, and put the slippers back into the box and wrapped it
up in the nice paper it had come in, and tied it with the notched ribbon.
She thought how she had meant to put the slippers away so, after the
dance, when she had danced her fill in them, and how differently she was
doing it all now. She wrote the clerk's name on the parcel, and then she
took the box, and descended to the office with it. There seemed to be
nobody there, but at the noise of her step Fane came round the case of
letter-boxes, and advanced to meet her at the long desk.

"What's wanted, Miss Claxon?" he asked, with his hopeless respectfulness.
"Anything I can do for you?"

She did not answer, but looked him solemnly in the eyes and laid the
parcel down on the open register, and then went out.

He looked at the address on the parcel, and when he untied it, the box
fell open and the shoes fell out of it, as they had with Clementina. He
ran with them behind the letter-box frame, and held them up before
Gregory, who was seated there on the stool he usually occupied, gloomily
nursing his knee.

"What do you suppose this means, Frank?"

Gregory looked at the shoes frowningly. "They're the slippers she got
to-day. She thinks you sent them to her."

"And she wouldn't have them because she thought I sent them! As sure as
I'm standing here, I never did it," said the clerk, solemnly.

"I know it," said Gregory. "I sent them."

"You!"

"What's so wonderful?" Gregory retorted. "I saw that she wanted them that
day when the shoe peddler was here. I could see it, and you could."

"Yes."

"I went across into the woods, and the man overtook me with his wagon. I
was tempted, and I bought the slippers of him. I wanted to give them to
her then, but I resisted, and I thought I should never give them. To-day,
when I heard that she was going to that dance, I sent them to her
anonymously. That's all there is about it."

The clerk had a moment of bitterness. "If she'd known it was you, she
wouldn't have given them back."

"That's to be seen. I shall tell her, now. I never meant her to know, but
she must, because she's doing you wrong in her ignorance."

Gregory was silent, and Fane was trying to measure the extent of his own
suffering, and to get the whole bearing of the incident in his mind. In