She looked at it for a long time, wondering to whom it
could have belonged, and had half a mind to announce her discovery to
Frank, but she was a wise woman and forbore. It lay underneath some
neckties which were not now worn, two or three silk pocket
handkerchiefs also discarded, and some manuscript books containing
school themes. She placed them on the top of the drawers as if they
had all been taken out in a lump and the slipper was at the bottom.
'Frank my dear,' she said after dinner, 'I emptied this morning one
of the drawers in the attic. I wish you would look over the things
and decide what you wish to keep. I have not examined them, but they
seem to be mostly rubbish.'
He went upstairs after he had smoked his cigar and read his paper.
There was the slipper! It all came back to him, that never-to-be-
forgotten night, when she rebuked him for the folly of kissing her
foot, and he begged the slipper and determined to preserve it for
ever, and thought how delightful it would be to take it out and look
at it when he was an old man. Even now he did not like to destroy
it, but Cecilia might have seen it and might ask him what he had done
with it, and what could he say? Finally he decided to burn it.
There was no fire, however, in the room, and while he stood
meditating, Cecilia called him. He replaced the slipper in the
drawer. He could not return that evening, but he intended to go back
the next morning, take the little parcel away in his pocket and burn
it at his office.
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