The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel B0082RD4EM

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 of intelligence. Sitting at night, reading under the drop-light, Lynde often had an odd sensation as if the little shoe would presently come tripping across the green table-cloth towards him. He had a hundred fanciful humors growing out of that slipper. Sometimes he was tempted to lock it up or throw it away. Sometimes he would say to himself, half mockingly and half sadly, "That is your wife's slipper;" then he would turn wholly sad, thinking how tragic that would be if it were really so.
    It was a part of the girl's self; it had borne her lovely weight; it still held the impress of her foot; it would not let Lynde entirely forget her while it was under his eyes.
    The slipper had stood on the writing-table four or five months—an object of consuming curiosity and speculation to the young woman who dusted Lynde's chambers—when an incident occurred which finally led to its banishment.
    Lynde never had visitors; there were few men of his age in the town, and none was sufficiently intimate with him to come to his rooms; but it chanced one evening that a young man named Preston dropped in to smoke a cigar with Lynde. Preston had recently returned from abroad, where he had been an attache of the American Legation at London, and was now generally regarded as the prospective proprietor of Miss Mildred. He was an entertaining, mercurial young fellow, into whose acquaintanceship Lynde had fallen at the Bowlsbys'.
    "Ah, you rogue!" cried Preston gayly, picking up the slipper. "Did she give it you?"
    "Who?" asked Lynde, with a start.
    "Devilish snug little foot! Was it a danseuse?"
    "No," returned Lynde freezingly.
    "An actress?"
    "No," said Lynde, taking the slipper from Preston's hand and gently setting it back on the writing-table. "It was not an actress; and yet she played a role—in a blacker tragedy than any you ever saw on the stage."
    "Lynde, I beg your pardon. I spoke thoughtlessly, supposing it a light matter, don't you see?"
    "There was no offence," said Lynde, hiding his subtile hurt.
    "It was stupid in me," said Preston the next night, relating the incident to Miss Bowlsby. "I never once thought it might be a thing connected with the memory of his mother or sister, don't you see? I took it for a half sentimental souvenir of some flirtation."
    "Mr. Lynde's mother died when he was a child, and he never had a sister," said Miss Bowlsby thoughtfully. "I shouldn't wonder," she added irrelevantly, after a pause.
    "At what, Miss Mildred?"
    "At anything!"
    One of those womanly intuitions which set mere man-logic at defiance was come to whisper in Miss Bowlsby's ear that that slipper had performed some part in Edward Lynde's untold summer experience.
    "He was laughing at you, Mr. Preston; he was grossly imposing on your unsophisticated innocence."
    "Really? Is he as deep as that?"
    "He is very deep," said Miss Bowlsby solemnly.
    On his way home from the bank, one afternoon in that same week, Lynde overtook Miss Mildred walking, and accompanied her a piece down the street.
    "Mr. Lynde, shall you go on another horseback excursion next summer?" she asked, without prelude.
    "I haven't decided; but I think not."
    "Of course you ought to go."
    "Why of course, Miss Mildred?"
    "Why? Because—because—don't ask me!"
    "But I do ask you."
    "You insist?"
    "Positively."
    "Well, then, how will you ever return Cinderella her slipper if you don't go in search of her?"
    Lynde bit his lip, and felt that the blackest