one
which her customer had overlooked.

"So it is," he replied; "do it up for me, please."

This Marietta proceeded to do in a very leisurely manner. She was making
up her mind to a bold step.

"Say, Mr. Dayton," she queried, as she took the last fold in the
wrapping paper; "what's the best mine to go into?"

"The best mine? Oh, I wouldn't touch one of them if I were you!"

"Yes, you would, if you were me! So you might as well tell me a good one
or I might make a mistake."

She held her head with the air of a princess, while the look of a
wood-nymph still dwelt in her shadowy eyes, but words and tone meant
"business."

"How much money have you got to lose?"

"Oh, fifty or a hundred dollars," she said carelessly.

Dayton strolled to the door and back again before he answered. He was
annoyed with Mrs. Jim for placing him in such a position, but he did not
see his way out of it. The next man she asked might be a sharper. His
ideas of woman's "sphere" were almost mediaeval, but somehow they did not
seem to fit Mrs. Jim's case.

"Well," he said at last with evident reluctance; "the 'Horn of Plenty'
doesn't seem to be any worse than the others, and it may be a grain
better. But it's all a gamble, just like roulette or faro, and I should
think you had better keep out of it altogether."

The "Horn of Plenty"! It was a name to appeal to the most sluggish
imagination; the mere sound of it filled Marietta with a joyful
confidence. Within the hour she had hailed a passing broker and
negotiated with him for five hundred shares of the stock at twenty cents
a share.

It was not without a strange pang, to be sure, that she wrote out her
check for the amount; for just as she was signing her name the unwelcome
thought crossed her mind that the person who was selling that amount of
stock for a hundred dollars must believe that sum of money to be a more
desirable possession than the stock! She felt the meaning of the
situation very keenly, but she did not betray her misgivings. As she
finished the scrawling signature she only lifted her head with a defiant
look, and said: "If anybody tells Jim, I'll _chew 'em up_!"

Inches, the broker, thus admonished, only laughed. Indeed, the thing
Inches admired most in Mrs. Jim was her forcible manner of expressing
herself. He admired and liked her well enough, for that and for other
reasons, to take a very disinterested pleasure in putting her in the way
of turning an honest penny.