Sheila was planning to wear one before she was a week older.

She and Charlotte Davis were in the latter's dainty room, and spread on the bed before them was Charlotte's new party frock. Charlotte's father was the wealthiest man in Shadyville, and both she and her frock did his wealth justice. She was now at home, for the Easter vacation, from a fashionable boarding-school in Baltimore, the Shadyville Seminary not satisfying Mr. Davis's requirements for his youngest and favorite daughter. Her absence from the little town during the greater part of the past two years had enabled her to erase its traces. She had become a typical city-bred girl and she appeared pert, smartly dressed and, for her sixteen years, amazingly mature. She had always been prettier than Sheila, though no one had ever realized it and probably no one ever would. For her prettiness was so informed with sharp intelligence that her face had a challenging and almost aggressive quality. Boys had never admired her, and men were not likely to do so either, so lacking was she in the softer and more appealing charms of her sex. Even at sixteen her bright blue eyes were a trifle hard, not because of what they had seen—for she was, in experience, still the nice little ingénue—but of what they had seen through. The veil of credulity never dimmed her clear, bold glance. But for Sheila she was always gentle, so strong in this shrewd, fastidious young creature was her one deep and uncritical affection.

As the two girls examined the frock on the bed—a rose chiffon over silk that fairly shrieked of expense—Sheila sighed. "Will you wear it Friday night?" she inquired wistfully.

For on Friday night Charlotte was to give a party—a real evening party to which the debutantes and even the older set were coming, as well as the school-girls and boys. It would be Sheila's first grown-up party—and she had only a white muslin and a blue sash to make herself fine with. Thus Mrs. Caldwell had dressed for parties until her marriage, and it had never occurred to her to provide any other costume for Sheila, who was not yet quite sixteen. Besides, in Mrs. Caldwell's opinion—and even in the exquisite Peter's—there was no sweeter sight than a young girl in white muslin and blue ribbons. But to Sheila, in comparison with Charlotte's splendor, the white muslin seemed unspeakably dowdy. And so, when she asked Charlotte about her toilette for the great occasion, it was with a heart of unfestive heaviness.

"Of course I'll wear this. That's what I got it for. Oh, Sheila, aren't the little sleeves cunning? Just half way to the elbow—it's lucky my arms aren't thin!"

But Sheila only sighed again in response to Charlotte's enthusiasm, and now Charlotte heard the sigh and glanced at her with sudden attentiveness. "What will you wear?" she demanded.

"I'll have to wear my white muslin. I haven't anything else."

"Oh, Sheila, that's too bad!"

"I wouldn't mind so very much except for—" And Sheila's eyes, wandering sadly toward Charlotte's chiffon, finished the sentence.

But Charlotte's dismay had already vanished. "You won't have to wear your white muslin either," she announced in her positive, capable way. "You can wear one of my frocks, Sheila. You must! Why"—this in a burst of generosity—"why, you can wear this one!"

"Oh, no, I couldn't do that. Not your new frock, Charlotte! But you're a dear to offer it!" And Sheila gave her friend a grateful hug, though Charlotte never encouraged caresses.

"Well, then, perhaps not this one," agreed Charlotte, to whom, used though she was to her pretty clothes, it would have been something of a hardship to surrender the first wearing of them to anyone else, "perhaps not this one—rose is more my color than yours. But another—a blue silk mull that will be lovely with your blue-gray eyes and black hair. I've worn it only two or three times, and never in Shadyville."

"No, I couldn't," said Sheila again. "Grandmother wouldn't let me. I'm sure she wouldn't."

"I don't see why."

"She wouldn't," persisted Sheila regretfully.

"Now look here, Sheila. She wouldn't know. You're going to spend the night with me and dress after you get here. And she's not coming to the party."

It was the same form of temptation which Ted had offered Sheila in the woods three years before, but now it was tenfold stronger. Then a mere good time was at stake; now the gratification of her young vanity, of her first girlish desire to make herself charming, was to be gained. And as she had hesitated that day in the woods, for the sake of the fun, she hesitated now for the sake of this new, clamoring instinct.

"I'd have to tell her," she temporized.

"Then tell her," assented Charlotte impatiently, "but don't tell her until afterwards."

It was Sheila's own method of that earlier time—a middle path between conscience and desire, and lightly skirting both.

"I might do that," she remarked thoughtfully. "If I told her—even afterwards—it wouldn't be quite so wicked. And I want to wear the frock dreadfully!"

"Just tell her as if it's nothing at all," advised Charlotte cleverly, "as if we never even thought of it until after you got here that evening. Then she won't mind it a bit. You'll see she won't!"

"Yes, she will. She won't like my wearing your clothes. She won't think it's nice. And when I tell, I'll tell the whole thing—the way it really happened. But"—and Sheila's full-lipped, generous mouth straightened into a thin line of resolution—"I'm going to do it anyway, Charlotte!"

Three days intervened before the party, and they were not happy days for Sheila. Her sense of guilt depressed every moment of the time, especially when she was in Mrs. Caldwell's trusting presence. For Sheila was not equipped by nature to sin comfortably.

But when the eventful night arrived, and she beheld herself at last in Charlotte's blue silk mull, with its short sleeves and little round neck frothy with lace, and its soft skirt falling to her very feet, she forgot every scruple that had been sacrificed to that enchanting end.

Charlotte, gay as a bright-hued bird with her blue eyes and yellow hair and rose-colored gown, and her mother and young Mrs. Bailey, her married sister, all stood around Sheila in an admiring circle, every now and then breaking out anew into delighted exclamations over their transformed Cinderella.

"Isn't she too sweet?"

"And look at her eyes—as blue as Charlotte's, aren't they?"

"And what a young lady she seems! Isn't that long skirt becoming to her?" cried Charlotte.

Charlotte had worn her party frocks long for the last year, and she approved emphatically of the dignity thus attained for a few hours. It gave her a delicious foretaste of the real young ladyhood to come, when she meant to be very dignified and very brilliant indeed.

But to all their pleased outcry, Sheila said nothing at all. She merely stood, radiant and silent, before them until they had to leave her for a last survey of the rooms downstairs, the flowers and the supper. Then, sure that she was quite alone, Cinderella stole to the mirror.

For a long time she gazed at the girl in the glass; a straight, slim girl in a delicate little gown that somehow brought out fully, for the first time, the charming delicacy of her face—not the delicacy of small features, of frail health, nor of a timid temper, but of an exceeding and subtle fineness, partly of the flesh, partly of the spirit, like the fineness of rare and gossamer fabrics. Sheila, of course, did not perceive this, which was always to be her one real claim to beauty, but she saw the frock itself, and white young shoulders rising from it, and above it a pair of shining eyes. And suddenly an ache came sharply into her throat and the shining eyes filled with tears.

"Oh," she whispered, leaning to the figure in the mirror, "Oh, this is what I wanted! I wanted to be beautiful!"