Mary nodded assurance, and went home, trying to feel that nothing of importance had happened. Do what she would, however, the golden visions would come dancing before her eyes. Suppose—suppose the stones should be real, after all! and suppose Mr. Gordon should give her a part, at least, of the money they might bring in Boston. It might—she knew diamonds were valuable—it might be thirty or forty dollars. Oh! how rich she would be! The rent could be paid some time in advance, and her mother could have the new shawl she needed so badly: or would a cloak be better? cloaks were more in fashion, but Mother said a good shawl was always good style.
Turning the corner by her mother's house, she met one of the clerks who had been in the office when she went in there. He looked at her with the smile she always disliked, she hardly knew why.
"You did the wrong thing that time, Miss Denison!" he said.
"What do you mean, Mr. Hitchcock?" asked Mary.
"You'll never see your diamonds again, nor the money for them!" replied the man. "That's easy guessing. He'll come back and tell you they're glass or paste, and that's the last you'll hear of them. And the diamonds—for they are diamonds, right enough—will go into his pocket, or on to his wife's neck. I know what's what! I wasn't born down in these parts."
"You don't know Mr. Gordon!" said Mary, warmly. "That isn't the way he is thought of by those who do know him."
The clerk was a newcomer from another State, and was not liked by the mill-workers.
"I know his kind!" he said, with a sneer; "and they're no good to your kind, Mary Denison, nor to mine. Mark my words, you'll hear no more of that breastpin."
Mary turned away so decidedly that he said no more, but his eyes followed her with a sinister look.
Next moment he was greeting Lena Laxen cordially, and she was dimpling and smiling all over at his compliments. Lena thought Mr. Hitchcock "just elegant!" and believed that Mary was jealous when she said she did not like him. Something now prompted her to tell him about the silk waist in the forbidden sack; he took her view at once and zealously. The boss (for he did not use the kindly title of "Old Man," by which the other mill-hands designated Mr. Gordon, though he was barely forty) had his eye on the things, most likely, as he had on the pin Mary Denison found. Hadn't Lena heard about that? Well, it was a burning shame, he could tell her; he would see that she, Lena, wasn't fooled that way. And Lena, listening eagerly, heard a story very different from that which had been told to Mr. Gordon.