Mrs. Corliss was delighted with her daughter’s find. “I am glad you
have the pretty necklace to wear with your best dresses,” she said. “It
is very nice and suitable for a schoolgirl. But the pearl ring--I think
we must put that away until you are older. It is too valuable and too
conspicuous. I don’t like to see little girls wearing jewelry.”
“I can wear it when I go to college--if I go; may I not, Mother?” asked
Mary wistfully.
“Oh, yes, _if_ you go to college, Dearie,” sighed her mother. “At any
rate, you can wear it when you are eighteen.”
Dr. Corliss examined the ring carefully. “Yes, I am sure I have seen
Aunt Nan wear it,” he said. “It must be one of the set of famous
pearls that she was once proud of. Doubtless she sold the rest long ago
and gave the money to her hospital. I am glad Mary has this; but Mother
is right. School-girls should not wear jewelry. Put it away until you
are grown-up, my daughter.”
So Mary fastened the pretty necklace about her round throat, and shut
the pearl ring away in her bureau drawer, with a sigh.
But Katy Summers said:--
“I wouldn’t mind, Mary, even if you can’t wear it yet. Just to think
that you have it, and that you got it in such a mysterious way! Why, it
is like a story-book!”
“Doesn’t it make you want to hear some more Shakespeare?” demanded
Mary, laughing.
“Indeed it does!” agreed Katy. “I’ll come and listen whenever you will
let me. Who knows what may happen? Yes, I’ll wager that Caliban knows.”
“The same thing never happens twice,” sighed Mary.
John was disgusted when he came home from a meeting of the Big Four to
find that he had missed this most exciting discovery; although, after
all, when it came to the jewelry, John thought the result rather
small. “My goodness, Mary!” he exclaimed, “I’ll bet there are lots more
things hidden in that old library of yours. Don’t you go and do all the
hunting when I’m not here.”
“I don’t,” said Mary. “I didn’t mean to hunt. I don’t ever mean to
hunt. But if things come--all right.”
“I wish you’d let me have the fun of hunting in the library all I want,
just once,” said John wistfully.
Mary hesitated. She did not want anybody to rummage among her books.
But she hated to be “stingy,” and she felt as if she were really having
more than her share of fun out of Aunt Nan’s legacy, in spite of John’s
two thousand dollars. So she said generously, without letting John see
how great an effort it was: “All right, Johnny. To-morrow is Saturday,
and I’ll give you free leave to hunt all you want to in my library. I
won’t even come to bother you.”
“Bully for you!” crowed John. “Finding’s having?”
But that was more than Mary bargained for.
“Oh, no, John!” she cried. “I don’t think Aunt Nan would like that. Do
you?”
“Oh, bother! I suppose not,” grumbled John. “She was a queer one!”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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