“Heaps of things—but about this vase—an old lady I was very fond of sent me up to buy that vase for her—if it had a mark upon it that she had made as a girl—a scratch. If it had not, I was not to buy it.”
Marcus said he was bewildered, he did not understand.
“You will if you listen,” said Elsie. “Her father had a collection of Chinese porcelain and he sold it. One piece, she told him, had been given to her, when she was a girl, by a young man with whom she was in love. Her father disputed her claim, and the vase was sold with the rest of the collection. She was middle-aged then. When she heard the collection was to be sold again—it was forty years since her father had parted with it, and she had grown to be a very old woman—she wanted to buy back that one piece.”
“Feminine persistence,” said Marcus.
“Yes, if you like to call it that—I suppose a man may call a woman’s faithfulness by any name he likes.”
“Did you find the mark?” asked Marcus meekly; he was always cowed by feminine firmness.
Elsie looked at him, and a doubt entered his mind. He asked if he might look at the vase—hold it in his hand?
She handed it to him. He looked at it, then at her. “You were to buy it, if there was a scratch upon it?”
Elsie nodded. He handed her back the vase.
“But—she—died happy,” Elsie said, perhaps pleading extenuating circumstances.