“Oh, you won’t, hey?” sneered Miss Crevey. “How are you going to stop me, Miss?”
“I’ll tell Aunt Martha,” said Jacqueline superbly. “And I’ll tell the constable, maybe. You made me a promise, and you’ve got no right to break it. You can’t sell those beads.”
Miss Crevey’s flushed face was white, like the white of a tallow candle. Jacqueline would never know in all her days how that allusion to the constable had struck terror to the very soul of the guilty, worried little old woman.
But Miss Crevey recovered herself quickly.
“I guess,” she sniffed, “I’ve wasted ’bout all the time I mean to waste on a thankless, sassy young one. You can just take your cheap brass beads off my hands. I won’t have ’em cluttering up my shop.”
“All right,” said Jacqueline indignantly. “I’ll be glad to take ’em.”
Miss Crevey leaned across the counter and spoke with a smile that parted her thin lips above her false teeth.
“And you can bring me back my cup,” she said.
For a second the shop went spinning round Jacqueline. How was it, she asked herself, that people felt before they fainted dead away? At a great distance, as it seemed to her, she heard her own voice speaking:
“I—can’t. Don’t you see? Not that cup! Why, it would kill Grandma.”