“The difficult hair to bring in, will be mine and Valentine’s,” pursued Zack. “Mine’s long enough, to be sure; I ought to have got it cut a month ago; but it’s so stiff and curly; and Blyth keeps his cropped so short--I don’t see what they can do with it (do you?), unless they make rings, or stars, or knobs, or something stumpy, in the way of a cross pattern of it.” “The people at the shop will know best,” said Mrs. Blyth, resolving to proceed cautiously. “One thing I’m determined on, though, beforehand,” cried Zack,--“the clasp. The clasp shall be a serpent, with turquoise eyes, and a carbuncle tail; and all our initials scored up somehow on his scales. Won’t that be splendid? I should like to surprise Madonna with it this very evening.” (“You shall never give it to her, if _I_ can help it,” grumbled Mrs. Peckover, still soliloquizing under her breath. “If anything in this world can bring her ill-luck, it will be a Hair Bracelet!”) These last words were spoken with perfect seriousness; for they were the result of the strongest superstitious conviction. From the time when the Hair Bracelet was found on Madonna’s mother, Mrs. Peckover had persuaded herself--not unnaturally, in the absence of any information to the contrary--that it had been in some way connected with the ruin and shame which had driven its unhappy possessor forth as an outcast, to die amongst strangers. To believe, in consequence, that a Hair Bracelet had brought “ill-luck” to the mother, and to derive from that belief the conviction that a Hair Bracelet would therefore also bring “ill-luck” to the child, was a perfectly direct and inevitable deductive process to Mrs. Peckover’s superstitious mind. The motives which had formerly influenced her to forbid her “little Mary” ever to begin anything important on a Friday, or ever to imperil her prosperity by walking under a ladder, were precisely the motives by which she was now actuated in determining to prevent the presentation of young Thorpe’s ill-omened gift. Although Valentine had only caught a word here and there, to guide him to the subject of Mrs. Peckover’s mutterings to herself while the game was going on, he guessed easily enough the general tenor of her thoughts, and suspected that she would, ere long, begin to talk louder than was at all desirable, if Zack proceeded much further with his present topic of conversation. Accordingly, he took advantage of a pause in the game, and of a relapse into another restless fit of walking about the room on young Thorpe’s part, to approach his wife’s couch, as if he wanted to find something lying near it, and to whisper to her, “Stop his talking any more about that present to Madonna; I’ll tell you why another time.”