“Oh! You don’t mean it?” cried the puzzled girl. “Of course, we don’t know that this one belongs to any of those Gypsies—”
“I should say not!” clucked Miss Titus. “The bracelet I mean was worn by Sarah Turner. She and I went together regular when we were girls. And going to prayer meeting one night, walking along here by the old Corner House, Sarah dropped her bracelet.”
“But—but!” gasped Agnes, “that must have been some time ago, Miss Titus.”
“It is according to how you compute time,” the dressmaker said. “Sarah and I were about of an age. And she isn’t more than forty years old right now!”
“I don’t think this bracelet we have is the one your friend lost,” Agnes said faintly, but confidently. She wanted to laugh but did not dare.
“How do you know?” demanded Miss Ann Titus in her snappy way—like the biting off of a thread when she was at work. “I should know it, even so long after it was lost, I assure you.”
“Why—how?” asked the Corner House girl curiously.
“By the scratches on it,” declared Miss Titus. “Sarah’s brother John made them with his pocketknife—on the inside of the bracelet—to see if it was real silver. Oh! he was a bad boy—as bad as Sammy Pinkney. And what do you think of his running away again?”
Agnes was glad the seamstress changed the subject right here. It seemed to her as though she had noticed scratches on the bracelet the Gypsies had placed in the basket the children bought. Could it be possible—
“No! That is ridiculous!” Agnes told herself. “It could not be possible that a bracelet lost forty years ago on Willow Street should turn up at this late date. And, having found it, why should those Gypsy women give it to Tess and Dot? There would be no sense in that.”