"There is no harm in asking, is there? Some one should be able to tell me what it is made of."
Philip, from his small store of physical geography, knew that meteors were articles of sufficient rarity to attract attention. And he was tenacious withal.
"I suppose that a jeweler would be the best man to judge. He must understand about stones," he went on.
"Maybe; but I don't see what's the use. 'Tis a sheer waste of time. But if y're set on findin' out, go to a big man. These German Jews round about here are omadhauns. They don't know a watch from a clock, an' if they did they'd chate ye."
"I never thought of that, yet I ought to know by this time. Thank you; I will go into the city."
He took the pebble, which he placed in his waistcoat pocket. Walking briskly, he traversed some part of the sorrowful journey of barely twelve hours earlier. What had happened to change his mood he did not know, and scarcely troubled to inquire. Last night he hurried through these streets in a frenzied quest for death. Now he strode along full of hope, joyous in the confidence of life and youth. His one dominant thought was that his mother had protected him, had snatched him from the dark gate of eternity. Oddly enough, he laid far more stress on his escape from the meteor than on the accident that prevented his contemplated suicide. This latter idea had vanished with the madness that induced it. Philip was sane again, morally and mentally. He was keenly anxious to justify his mother's trust in him. The blustering wind, annoying to most wayfarers, only aroused in him a spirit of resistance, of fortitude. He breasted it so manfully that when at last he paused at the door of a great jewelry establishment in Ludgate Hill, his face was flushed and his manner eager and animated.
He opened the door, but was rudely brought back to a sense of his surroundings by the suspicious question of a shop-walker.
"Now, boy, what do you want here?"
The unconscious stress in the man's words was certainly borne out by the contrast between Philip, a social pariah in attire, and the wealth of gold and precious stones cut off from him by panes of thick glass and iron bars. What, indeed, did this outcast want there?
Confused by the sudden demand, and no less by its complete obviousness, Philip flushed and stammered: