“Thank you ever so much,” she said finally. “I think I’ll look around a little more and ask about my own, and if I can’t find it, I may come back and buy one of yours. Several of those you have are very pretty.”
Thoroughly satisfied with her interview, she walked down the street until she came to another shop. It was on the corner of an alley, and just as she approached the intersection she noticed a woman in an old-fashioned brown suit coming out of the side door of the pawnshop. The woman glanced about furtively, as if she did not care to be seen, and caught Mary Louise’s eyes. With a gasp of surprise, the girl recognized her immediately. It was Miss Henrietta Stoddard!
Before Mary Louise could even nod to her, the woman had slipped across the street and around the corner, lost amid the Saturday morning crowd that was thronging the busy street. Mary Louise repressed a smile and entered the pawnshop by the front door.
She repeated her former experience, with this difference, however: she did not find the shopkeeper nearly so cordial or so willing to co-operate. Finally she asked point-blank what the woman in the brown suit had just pawned.
“I can’t see that that’s any of your business, miss,” he replied disagreeably. “But I will tell you that it wasn’t a watch.”
Mary Louise wasn’t sure that she believed him. But there was nothing that she could do without enlisting the help of her father.
She visited four other shops without any success, and finally decided to abandon the plan. It was too hopeless, too hit-or-miss, to expect to find those watches by that kind of searching. Far better, she concluded, to concentrate on observing the actions of the people at Stoddard House. Especially Miss Henrietta Stoddard herself!
So she turned her steps to the big department store where she believed Margaret Detweiler had worked till last Christmas and inquired her way to the employment office. The store was brilliantly decorated for Christmas, and crowds of late shoppers filled the aisles and the elevators, so that it was not easy to reach her destination.
Nor was the employment manager’s office empty. Even at this late date, applicants were evidently hoping for jobs, and Mary Louise had to sit down and wait her turn. It was half an hour later that she found herself opposite the manager’s desk.
Mechanically a clerk handed her an application to fill out.