ve 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. Atwell held that the help who had seen the girl trying them on had
clubbed together and got them for her at the time; and had now given
them to her for the honor she had done the Middlemount House in the
parade. Mrs. Milray argued that the spring and summer months had
secretly dispatched some fall and winter month to ransack the stores at
Middlemount Centre for them. Clementina believed that they came from the
shoe man himself, who had always wanted to send them, in the hope that
she would keep them, and had merely happened to send them just then
in that moment of extremity when she was helpless against them. Each
conjecture involved improbabilities so gross that it left the field free
to any opposite theory.

Rumor of the fact could not fail to go through the house, and long
before his day's work was done it