“There is a new version of the story, my boy. The modern Cinderella is a princess, the daughter of a money-king, and her lover a poor shoemaker. The slippers were his workmanship, and had a fairy power to test her truth, and—Louis—when she wore them, and thought of him as he was—no, not that, but as he appeared; for he was a prince at heart, but a shoemaker by trade,—then, Louis, her fine raiment and her glittering equipage vanished, and she appeared to those who understood her only a poor cinder girl, sitting among the ashes that had ruined a thousand lives to enrich one.” “And therefore she left the ashes, and came to her lover in her rags,” said Louis, smiling proudly. “Do you think so?” said the doctor. “Well, well, after all you are only children, and have kissed each other many a time. She will go to Paris”— “—And come home again,” said Louis. While Pinkie, as she packed away the pretty china tile with the fair young face upon it, murmured to herself, “There’s no good in showing it to Virgie, she would laugh; and as for papa, it is none of his business. But oh! Louis, if only you were anything but a shoemaker!” CHAPTER V. “=Das Ding-an-Sich.=” It was with a heart that knew not whether to be sad or joyful that Louis returned home on that eventful afternoon, upon which he had made such a stride in his young life. Pinkie’s brown eyes had been his lights to rule the day and the night, since either of them could remember; her rosy, audacious, mutinous little face was part and parcel of his very consciousness. Yet, perhaps, just because he could not imagine himself without her, his imagination had never risen to picturing his life _with_ her—at Prices. She was simply his; there was neither past, present, nor future to their life together; only one beautiful, glorious, eternal now. Upon this state of mind the thought of separation had acted as the jar which was all that was needful to produce crystallization, a jar which any other event might at any moment have supplied; so that the money-king had after all been wise in his day and generation. But the electricity evolved in the crystallization had given poor Louis a rather severe shock. He had been accustomed to look upon “Prices” as the brief epitome of the time, the picture in little of that which the world ought to be. But as he re-entered it now, late in the afternoon, it seemed strangely altered. The great dining-hall stretched blackly before him; the long lines of tables seeming to reach out to infinity, and the pale windows glimmering like a vanished hope. Miss Sally met him in the corridor. “You’re late, Louis,” she said, “and that ain’t usual. Have you had your supper? You don’t mean you went out without your overcoat! Don’t you know these March days ain’t to be trusted? Why, you’re as pale as a ghost.”