The girl stood rooted to the spot, gazing at me in mingled sorrow and amazement.
"But oh, Mrs. Stevens," she cried, the tears coming into her eyes, "you will not dismiss me this way? I will lose my place if you do!"
I sank into a chair, torn by conflicting emotions, as a novelist would say of his distraught heroine.
"Do you want me to climb into that thing, here and now?" I gasped.
"If madame will be so kind," murmured the girl, imploringly.
With joy, I now heard the tinkling of cracked ice against cut-glass. Suzanne, to my great relief, entered the room.
"Suzanne," I said, courageously, "I will trouble you to tog me out in this--ah--silk remnant. Have you got a kodak, girl?" I asked, playfully, turning toward the astonished young dressmaker. "You're not a yellow reporter?"
"Oh, Mrs. Stevens!" cried the girl, deprecatingly, glancing interrogatively at Suzanne. Perhaps the cracked ice and my eccentric manner had aroused suspicions in her mind.
A moment later, I found myself in Caroline's dressing-room alone with Suzanne, who had recovered her spirits in the delight that her present task engendered.
"Madame's neck and arms are so beautiful!" she murmured in French, pulling the skirt of the ball-dress, a dainty affair made of mauve silk, with a darker shade of velvet for trimmings, into position. "Ah, such a wonderful hang! It is worthy of Paris, madame."