Charlotte, gay as a bright-hued bird with her blue eyes and yellow hair
and rose-colored gown, and her mother and young Mrs. Bailey, her
married sister, all stood around Sheila in an admiring circle, every
now and then breaking out anew into delighted exclamations over their
transformed Cinderella.

"Isn't she too sweet?"

"And look at her eyes--as blue as Charlotte's, aren't they?"

"And what a young lady she seems! Isn't that long skirt becoming to
her?" cried Charlotte.

Charlotte had worn her party frocks long for the last year, and she
approved emphatically of the dignity thus attained for a few hours. It
gave her a delicious foretaste of the real young ladyhood to come, when
she meant to be very dignified and very brilliant indeed.

But to all their pleased outcry, Sheila said nothing at all. She
merely stood, radiant and silent, before them until they had to leave
her for a last survey of the rooms downstairs, the flowers and the
supper. Then, sure that she was quite alone, Cinderella stole to the
mirror.

For a long time she gazed at the girl in the glass; a straight, slim
girl in a delicate little gown that somehow brought out fully, for the
first time, the charming delicacy of her face--not the delicacy of
small features, of frail health, nor of a timid temper, but of an
exceeding and subtle fineness, partly of the flesh, partly of the
spirit, like the fineness of rare and gossamer fabrics. Sheila, of
course, did not perceive this, which was always to be her one real
claim to beauty, but she saw the frock itself, and white young
shoulders rising from it, and above it a pair of shining eyes. And
suddenly an ache came sharply into her throat and the shining eyes
filled with tears.

"Oh," she whispered, leaning to the figure in the mirror, "Oh, _this_
is what I wanted! _I wanted to be beautiful_!"

CHAPTER IV

The evening was half over when Sheila, still up-borne on the tide of
her feminine exultation, glanced across the room to find that Peter
stood there quietly regarding her. Straightway she forsook the youth
who was administering awkward flattery to her new-born vanity, and
hastened to the side of her old friend.

"Oh, Peter, don't I look nice?" she demanded eagerly.

But Peter ignored the frank appeal for a compliment. "I think you'd
better call me Mr. Burnett," said he. And his tone was so serious that
she failed to catch the banter of his eyes.

"Why, I've always called you