But the maid returned without the pin.
"I can't find it, Miss Iris. I put it on the under side of my own pincushion, and there's none there now. I asked Polly and she said she didn't touch it. Where could it have gone?"
"You used it unthinkingly. It doesn't matter, there's no such thing as a lucky pin, Agnes. You can just as well take any other pin out of Aunt Ursula's cushion—take one, if you like—and call that your 'Luck.' Don't be a silly!"
Iris smiled to think that neither of the pins her strange visitor carried off with him was the right one, after all. "But," she thought, "it makes no difference, anyway, as he thinks he has it. He's sure it's one of the two he has; if there were three uncertain ones it would be too complicated. Let the poor man rest satisfied. I wonder if he found the dime."
But looking from the window she could see no sign of her late caller, and she dismissed the subject from her mind at once.
Yet she had not heard the last of it.
In the evening mail a letter came for her. It was in an unfamiliar handwriting, and was written on a single plain sheet of paper.
The note ran:
Miss Clyde,