"What she wants of a dust-cap I dunno," Mis' Holcomb contributes, pointing to the little lace and ribbon cap hanging beside the toilet-table. And I'd wondered that myself. She put it on for breakfast, like she was going to do some work; then she never done a thing the whole morning, only wrote. Then all of a sudden was when I come out with something surprising. "Why," says I, "it's gone!" "What's gone?" they says. And I was looking so hard I couldn't answer--bureau, chest of drawers, bookshelves, I looked on all of them. "It ain't here anywhere," says I, "and he was _that_ handsome--" I told them about the photograph, as well as I could. It was always standing on the bureau, right close up by the glass--a man's picture that always made me want to say: "Well, you look just exactly the way you _ought_ to look. And I believe you are it." He looked like what you mean when you say "man" when you're young--big and dark and frank and boyish and manly, with eyes that give their truth to you and count on having yours back again. That kind. "Land," I says. "I'd leave a picture like that up in my room no matter what occurred between me and the one the picture was the picture of. I _couldn't_ take it down." But now it was down, though I remembered seeing it stand there every time I'd dusted ever since Miss Mayhew had come, up till this day. And when I'd told the women all about it, they couldn't recover from looking. They looked so energetic that finally Mis' Toplady pulled out the wardrobe a little mite and peeked behind it. "I thought mebbe it'd got itself stuck in here," she explains, bringing her head back with a great streak of dust on her cheek--and I didn't take it as any reflection whatever on my housekeeping. I've always believed that there's some furniture that the dust just rises out of, in the night, like cream--and of those the backs of wardrobes are chief. Then she shoved the wardrobe in place, and the door that I'd fixed at the top with a little wob of newspaper so it would stay shut, all of a sudden swung open, and the other one followed suit. We three stood staring at what was inside. For my wardrobe, that had never had anything in it better than my best black silk, was hung full of pink and blue and rose and white and lavender clothes. Dresses they were, some with little scraps of shining trimming on, and all of them not like anything any of us had ever seen, outside of fashion books--if any. "My land!" says I, sitting down on the edge of the fresh-made bed--a thing I never do in my right senses. "Party clothes!" says Mis' Holcomb, kind of awelike. "Ball-gowns," she says it over, to make them sound as grand as they looked. "Why, mercy me," Mis' Toplady says, standing close up and staring. "She's an actress, that's what she is. Them's stage clothes."