"I'm sure I do want to sell, if I can get as much as ten pounds for the thing," I answered. "Nothing less than seven guineas would be of any use to me. There's something which costs seven guineas—a thing I'm dying to buy. My mother left this scarf to me, as well as some other lace I wouldn't sell for the world. But it's quite mine and I can do as I like with it."
"Let me see! Ten pounds is fifty dollars, isn't it?" the man reflected out aloud.
"I don't know," I caught him up, "anything about American money or America."
He smiled at me again. Perhaps I had hoped he would.
"That's too bad! You ought to come over on our side and learn."
"I'd love to, especially to the parts where I could show off my French and Spanish. But I'm sure I shall never get the chance to cross the sea." I was three thousand miles from dreaming then of all the things that were to come out of this little affair of the scarf and the dress which had tempted me to put my lace on the market.
"Well," he went on, going back from me to my property. "I'll buy this pretty thing for ten pounds if you like to sell it to me; but honestly, I warn you that for all I know it may be worth a lot more."
"I'll be perfectly satisfied with ten pounds," I said. "But I don't wish you to buy just out of kindness, when I'm almost sure you don't really want to."
"But I do," he assured me. "I came into this place to carry out a commission for an aunt of mine in America. She wrote and asked me to find her something in a curiosity shop in England that she could give for a wedding present to a girl who's wild about antiques. An old friend of ours is going to take the parcel back with her when she sails to-morrow; smuggle it, maybe, but that's not my business. I thought of a miniature on ivory, but I haven't taken a big fancy to anything I've seen so far. I like your lace better, and it costs just the money my aunt told me to spend. So there you are."
"And there's the lace," I added, laughing. "It's yours. Thank you very much."