She spoke in her most dignified tone, and although Dorothy was barely in her twentieth year she had the manner and stability of one much older. She realized that poor Tavia was in danger of “going all to pieces” if the strain continued. And, too, her own anger at the woman’s harsh accusation naturally put the girl on her mettle.
“Who are you, I’d like to know?” snapped the woman.
“I am her friend,” said Dorothy Dale, quite composedly, “and I know her to be incapable of taking your bag save by chance. She laid her own down on the counter and took up yours——”
“And where is mine?” suddenly wailed Tavia, on the verge of an hysterical outbreak. “My bag! My money——”
“Hush!” whispered Dorothy in her friend’s pretty ear. “Don’t become a second harridan—like this creature.”
The woman had led the way back to the silk counter. Tavia began to claw wildly among the broken bolts of silk that the clerk had not yet been able to return to the shelves. But she stopped at Dorothy’s command, and stood, pale and trembling.
A floorwalker hastened forward. He evidently knew the noisy woman as a good customer of the store.
“Mrs. Halbridge! What is the matter? Nothing serious, I hope?”
“It would have been serious all right,” said the customer, in her high-pitched voice, “if I hadn’t just seen that girl by luck. Yes, by luck! There she was making for the door with this bag of mine—and there’s several hundred dollars in it, I’d have you know.”
“I beg of you, Mrs. Halbridge,” said the floorwalker in a low tone, “for the sake of the store to make no trouble about it here. If you insist we will take the girl up to the superintendent’s office——”