"Well, we'll manage some way."
And Suzanna was satisfied.
A week later Mr. Procter returned home, carrying a mysterious looking parcel.
"For you, Suzanna," he said, his eyes sparkling. "But let's not open it until after supper."
Suzanna reluctantly put the package to one side. That supper would never end that evening she had a firm conviction.
And yet the end was reached, and she was opening the package, attended by the entire family. At last her eager eyes swept the contents, and her little beating heart for the moment palpitated strangely in her throat, for there lay a pair of shoes.
"Shoes," said Mr. Procter, "for you to wear in the Indian Drill. I saw them thrown out in a little booth when I went into Lane's shoe shop for a piece of leather to be made into washers. They really were marked at so ridiculously low a figure that I thought at once we could surely afford them for Suzanna. They are, I should judge, the very thing for the Indian Drill."
To all of which Suzanna listened gravely. Her heart had gone back to its normal rhythm, but her eyes could not leave the atrocities lying before her. Truly, they were of fine leather, but with their high French heels, and flat gilt buttons, they might have been in style when Suzanna's mother was a very little girl, and, to be really candid, they would have lain under the anathema of being out of date even then. But over and beyond the painful vintage of the shoes was the fact that Miss Smithson had announced that all the girls taking part in the Indian Drill should wear the same kind of shoes. She had gone farther and told the children that the right kind of shoes could be obtained at Bryson's for a dollar and forty-eight cents a pair, a really reduced price because fourteen pairs were to be purchased. She had finished by giving the children the number to be called for, "A-14116." Suzanna knew the number well; she had repeated it mentally over and over again.
Finally Suzanna found her voice. "They're very nice, daddy," she said.
"Yes, they are very nice," he said. "See, you can turn them up. They're as soft as a kid glove."