“Thank you, Mr. Lockhart,” Miss Ray answered. “It wouldn’t do to let one’s methods become as antique as one’s goods in this case, would it?”
“Miss Ray, I want to present my friend, Mr. Black.” Tom forgot his new friend’s title as he made this introduction, but of course it didn’t matter. Though Miss Ray seldom attended church anywhere, she could hardly fail, in the talkative suburban town, to know that at the “Stone Church” there was a new man. “He wants to get some of his pictures framed, and of course I led him here,” added Tom, with his boyish grin. He looked at Miss Ray with his usual frankly admiring gaze. No doubt but she was worth it. Not often does a woman shopkeeper achieve the subtle effect of being a young hostess in her own apartments as did Jane Ray. And, as every woman shopkeeper knows, that is the highest, as it is the most difficult, art of shopkeeping.
She scanned the pictures—one that of the hurdle race, the other a view of a country road, with a white spired church in the distance. In no time she had them fitted into precisely the right frames, these enhancing their values as well-chosen frames do. Delighted but still cautious, Black inquired the prices. Miss Ray mentioned them, adding the phrase with which he was familiar, “with the clerical discount.”
“Thank you!” acknowledged Black. “What are they without the discount, please?”
Miss Ray glanced at him. “I am accustomed to give it,” she observed.
“I am accustomed not to take it,” said the Scotsman, firmly. “But I’m just as much obliged.”
She smiled, and told him the regular price. He counted this out, expressed his pleasure in having found precisely what he wanted, and led the way out.
Jane Ray looked after his well-set shoulders, noting that he did not put his hat upon his close-cut, inclined-to-be-wirily-curly black hair until he had reached the street. Then she looked down at the money in her hand. “Wouldn’t take a discount—and didn’t ask me to come to his church,” she commented to herself. “Must be rather a new sort.” She then promptly dismissed him from her thoughts—until later in the day, when the memory was brought back to her by another incident.
It was well along in the afternoon, and she had just sold a genuine Eli Terry “grandfather” clock at a fair profit, and had bargained for and secured several very beautiful pieces of Waterford glass which she had long coveted. A succession of heavy showers had cleared her shop, and she had found time to open a long roll which the expressman had delivered in the morning, when the shop door admitted a person to whom she turned an eager face.
“Oh, I’m glad it’s you!” she said. “Come and see what I have now!”