"Pardon me, Mrs. Stevens, but I was told to wait for you here."
A pretty girl confronted me, standing guard over a large pasteboard box that she had placed upon a chair.
"You--ah--have something for me?" I asked, coldly. I was beginning to wonder where Caroline's leisure came in.
"Your new ball-dress, Mrs. Stevens. You promised to try it on this morning, you remember."
"Very well! Leave it, then. I'll get into it later on. I've no doubt it'll fit me like a glove."
The girl stared at me for a moment, then recovered herself and said:
"Madame Bonari will be displeased with me, Mrs. Stevens, if I do not return to her with the report that you find the dress satisfactory. I may await your pleasure, may I not? Madame Bonari would discharge me if I went back to her now."
"Let me see the dress, girl," I muttered, reluctantly. To don a ball-dress in full daylight to save a poor maiden from losing her situation was for me to make a greater sacrifice than this dressmaker's apprentice could realize.
The girl opened the box, and I gazed, awestruck, at a garment that filled me with a strange kind of terror. There was not a great deal of it. It was not its size that frightened me; it was the shape of the thing that was startling.
"That'll do, girl," I exclaimed, somewhat hysterically. "Tell--ah--Madame Bonari that this--ah--polonaise is a howling success. I can see at a glance that it was made for me," and added, under my breath, "to pay for."