g-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. She went away disappointed, but not yet
disheartened; youth does not so easily renounce a pleasure pressed to
the lips; and Clementina had it in her head to ask some of the table
girls to help her out. She meant to try first with that big girl who had
helped her put on the shoeman's bronze slippers; and she hurried through
the office, pushing purblindly past Fane without looking his way, when
he called to her in the deference which he now always used with her,
"Here's a package here for you, Clementina--Miss Claxon," and he gave
her an oblong parcel, addressed in 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 ha