I had her other arm, and we turned toward the kitchen. And we were hushed as if we had heard some futile, unfulfilled wish of the dead still beating impotent wings. In the kitchen doorway Hannah Hager was standing. She must have seen that glowing, heaped-up silk on the table, but it did not even hold her glance. For she had heard what Grandma Hawley had been saying, and it had touched her, who was so jealously devoted to the old woman, perhaps even more than it had touched Calliope and me. "Miss Marsh, now," Hannah tried to say, "shall I put the butter that's left in the cookin'-butter jar?" And then her little features were caught here and there in the puckers of a very child's weeping, and she stood before us as a child might stand, crying softly without covering her face. She held out a hand to the old woman, and Calliope and I let her lead her to the stove. My heart went out to the little maid for her tears and to Calliope for the sympathy in her eyes. Grandma Hawley was talking on. "I must 'a' got a little cold," she said plaintively. "It always settles in my head. My head's real bad. An' now I got m' feet wet--" II To Madame Josephine, the modiste who sometimes comes to me with her magic touch, transforming this and that, I confided something of my plans for Calliope, asked her if she would do what she could. Her kindly, emotional nature responded to the situation as to a kind of challenge. "_Bien!_" she cried. "We shall see. You say she is slim--_petite_--with some little grace? _Bien!_" So when, next day, Calliope arrived at my house with her parcel brought forth for the first time in sixteen years, she found madame and me both tip-toe with excitement. And from some bewildering plates madame explained how she would cut and suit and "correct" mademoiselle. "The effect shall be long, slim, excellent. Soft folds from one's waist--so. From one's shoulder--so. A line of velvet here and here and down. _Bien!_ Mademoiselle will look younger than everyone! _If_ mademoiselle would wave ze hair back a ver' little--so?" the French woman delicately advanced. "Ma'moiselle," returned Calliope recklessly, "will do anything you want her to, short of a pink rose over one ear. My land, I never hed a dress before that I didn't hev to skimp the pattern and make it up less according to my taste than according to my cloth." That day I sent to the city for a box at the opera. I chose "Faust," and smiled as I planned to sing the Jewel Song for Calliope before we went, and to laugh at her in her surprising rôle of Butterfly. "_Ah, je ris de me voir si belle._" A lower proscenium box, a modest suite at a comfortable hotel, a little supper, a cab--I planned it all for the pleasure of watching her; and all this would, I knew, be given its significance by the wearing of the anomalous, rosy gown. And I loved Calliope for her weakness as we love the whip-poor-will for his little catching of the breath.