Eva ran up stairs, found the shawl, and came down with it falling in rich folds across her arm.
“Ah, that is it,” cried the pawnbroker, eagerly rubbing his hands. “I should know the pattern among ten thousand. To think now that I should have known its value so little! It cuts me to the soul!”
Mrs. Carter had taken the shawl, and was busy opening its marvelous folds, revealing the long slender palm leaves, in which the best tints of a rainbow were wrought with the toil and art seldom bestowed on the modern fabrics that flood our market.
“Ah, it is so beautiful! I should hate to part with it,” said Eva, who had learned to estimate a creation like that in her life behind the counter. “You might search years without finding one like it.”
“You hear?” said Mrs. Carter, looking irresolutely at the anxious pawnbroker.
“Yes, madam, I hear; but if it is beautiful to a stranger, how much more so to the person who owned it?”
Mrs. Carter looked at Eva with distress in her eyes, and hesitation in her manner.
“What can I do? It does seem hard.”
Before Eva could answer, the man broke in,
“Besides, madam will remember, that I am a poor man, and have spent much time in searching for that shawl, which time is a dead loss, if I fail to bring it back to the owner, who is ready to pay me.”