The broker's faith in the "Horn of Plenty" was almost as implicit as
Marietta's own, and it was with no little pride that he brought the
certificate in to her the following day, and unfolded it to her dazzled
contemplation. It was a very beauteous production done in green and
gold, the design being suggestive and encouraging. It represented a
woman clad in green, pointing with a magic golden wand in her left hand
toward a group of toiling green miners, while from a golden cornucopia
in her right she poured a shower of gold upon an already portentous
pyramid of that valuable metal, planted upon a green field.

As Marietta refolded the crisply rustling paper, Inches bent his head
toward her and said, confidentially: "She's bound to touch fifty cents
inside of thirty days;" and Marietta, still thinking of the bountiful
lady of the golden cornucopia, believed him.

"Inside of thirty days" the "H. O. P.," as it was familiarly called, was
selling at forty-five cents, and the world was very much agog on the
subject. There had been fluctuations in the meanwhile, fluctuations
which Marietta watched with eager intentness. Once, on the strength of
disquieting rumors about the management, the stock dropped to sixteen
cents and Marietta's hopes sank accordingly; she felt as if she had
picked Jim's pocket. But the "H. O. P." soon rallied, and day by day it
crept upwards while Marietta's spirits crept upwards with it,
cautiously, questioningly. Should she sell? Should she hold on? If only
she might talk it over with Jim! That was something she poignantly
missed; she had never had a secret from Jim before. To make up for her
reticence on this point she used to tell him more minutely than ever of
all that went on in the shop below. Jim thought he had never known
Marietta so entertaining.

"I say, Marietta, it's a shame you're nothing but a shop-keeper's wife!"
he said to her one evening as she sat darning stockings by the
lamp-light in the dingy attic room. "You'd ought to have been a duchess
or a governor's wife or something like that, so's folks would have found
out how smart you was."

"Listen at him!" cried Marietta.

The words might have offended the taste of the governor who had failed
to secure this valuable matrimonial alliance, but the poise of the
pretty head, as she cast an affectionate look upon Jim, lying on the old
sofa, would have graced the proudest duchess of them all.

Now the "Horn of Plenty" was a Lame Gulch