Now Jane had a great passion for trinkets of all kinds, and it is doubtful if the whole of the bribe for which she waited, would not have taken the form of some paltry ornament within twenty-four hours, had it been paid down in gold. As it was, she pressed her eye close to the glass, and peered gloatingly down upon the burning stones, conscious of their brightness, and with a dazed sense of their value. Directly Madame De Marke closed the casket, and thrust it into the depths of a soiled pocket, that hung between her ragged calico dress and a repulsive under-shirt made from the fragments of an old patch-work bed-quilt. Then she clasped the iron bars over her box, and going down upon her hands and knees again, thrust it away out of sight, reappearing feet foremost, while her face, as it looked out from under her arm, had the aspect of a laughing hyena, so visible were the workings of some new-born diabolical craft upon it. “Now what is she about? what is it makes her smile so?” thought Jane Kelly, recoiling from the window-pane with a shudder, for as the woman arose her sharp eyes were turned that way. “Is she a witch? Does she know that I am peeping? _Is_ that gold? Is the case——” She broke off suddenly, and shrunk backward into the darkest corner of the passage, cowering down as if she had been seated on the floor and was but just aroused. Madame De Marke opened the door, and her little, sharp face peered out. “Come, come—hist, have ye gone?” she whispered. “No, I am here; the darkness makes me drowsy, that’s all!” answered Jane, coming forward, “especially after watching so many nights without a wink of sleep.” “Step in quick—why there’s heat enough gone through the door already to warm a barn. Heat costs money, don’t you know that? It’s enough to ruin one to have company in this way, wasting everything.” Jane entered the room. “You haven’t thought better of it? You are resolute to strip me of more money than I can save in a year? You won’t relent, eh?” “I want the money, ma’am, nothing more. It’s my just right. I’ve earned it, if anybody on earth ever did.” “And you won’t take anything but money, not money’s worth, now?” cried madame, peering eagerly into the face of her visitor. “Why? Haven’t you got the change handy?” asked Jane, with her thoughts fixed longingly on the jewels she had seen. “The change! She calls seventy-five dollars change. As if a lone woman, like me, ever had so much money by her at once.” Jane thought of the gold she had seen, but still her wishes turned to the diamonds in preference, and she said quickly, “Well, money or money’s worth. I don’t much care which, so long as it’s the genuine article.” “Well,” said the old woman, drawing the casket slowly from her pocket, and opening it; “here’s something now worth five times the money, and just the thing for you, with your plump neck and rosy cheeks. What say? Will ye have ’em instead of the money, especially as the money can’t be had just yet?”