“Newburyport! Old Newburyport—the only Newburyport in the United States!” sighed the girl. “I have been wanting all summer long to go there; my great-gran’father lived there once; at least, he used to sail out of Newburyport on his long voyages to the West Indies; he went all round the world sometimes.”
This was the gayest evening of her life, the most utterly happy one since she had lost her parents, yet as young Stackpole went off to summon the lawyer who was “side-stepping his own legal line” by taking up with some matter outside it, she felt as if her heart shrank until it was the size of a peanut, squeezed by poverty’s iron hand; she had not been able even to afford the train fare to Newburyport, a town in the same State, without imposing on Cousin Anne.
“Never mind, it won’t always be so; I’ll soon be independent, earning money in some way, even among a storm of typewriters! And I’ll always have the silver sunburst to remind me of this happy summer and that, as a Camp Fire Girl, I’m a daughter of the Sun,” she murmured to herself even as her hand went up to the back of her neck to unfasten Arline’s silver chain, in order that the stranger might examine her coin-pendant closely.
“It certainly is a most beautiful specimen of Peruvian coinage,” that stranger was exclaiming presently after Miles had duly introduced him to its owner. “Do you mind if I take it over there to the farther end of the room where there are some electric lights that aren’t dressed up like Chinese mandarins, so’s to see it better?”
“Not at all!” they agreed and followed him like happy children, Miles and Jessica.
Several of Jessica’s Camp Fire Sisters of the Morning-Glory Tribe, hovering around their sweet-faced Guardian, also migrated to that far end of the long room where there were no swinging, red-and-yellow, mandarin lights; so did two or three of the Scouts, with Captain Andy, looming massive in this hall of revelry, at their heels.
“Yes, I don’t think these South Peruvian pesos were issued after 1838,” remarked the lawyer, his words dropping clearly into the heart of the lull between the music and dances. “I can make out the inscription above the sun-stamp fairly well: ‘Repub Sud Peruana,’ and that grotesque little sun-face—like a microscopic All-hallowe’en face—at the heart of the sunburst. But—but what is this fresh engraving, if you can call it so, beneath it?”
“My initials in a tiny monogram,” laughed Jessica. “He put them there”—glancing up at Miles—“in honor of my seeing it first.”
“What Philistinism! What youthful arrogance!” gasped the lawyer half under his breath. “Why, it spoils the ancient stamp!” angrily.
“Not so! I made too slick a job of it for that!” maintained the eighteen-year-old Scout, with a chuckle, not caring in the least that an elderly lawyer who was “side-stepping his own job” should denounce his act as that of a spoiling Philistine; nobody else of the group or throng, now augmented by almost every young person in the room, exactly caught the stranger’s words and meaning, with the exception of the Camp Fire Guardian.