know it in your heart!"

The startled man faltered, then he faced the women. The people who
stood near seemed made of eyes as they stared to see what he would
say.

"I swear by my right hand I never touched it."

"Curse your right hand, then!" cried Hannah Knowles, growing tall and
thin like a white flame drawing upward. "Curse your right hand, yours
and all your folks' that follow you! May I live to see the day!"

The people drew back, while for a moment accused and accuser stood
face to face. Then Holt's flushed face turned white, and he shrank
from the fire in those wild eyes, and walked away clumsily down the
courtroom. Nobody followed him, nobody shook hands with him, or told
the acquitted man that they were glad of his release. Half an hour
later, Betsey and Hannah Knowles took their homeward way, to begin
their hard round of work again. The horizon that had widened with such
glory for one night, had closed round them again like an iron wall.

Betsey was alarmed and excited by her sister's uncharacteristic
behavior, and she looked at her anxiously from time to time. Hannah
had become the harder-faced of the two. Her disappointment was the
keener, for she had kept more of the unsatisfied desires of her
girlhood until that dreary morning when they found the sea-chest
rifled and the treasure gone.

Betsey said inconsequently that it was a pity she did not have that
black silk gown that would stand alone. They had planned for it over
the open chest, and Hannah's was to be a handsome green. They might
have worn them to court. But even the pathetic facetiousness of her
elder sister did not bring a smile to Hannah Knowles's face, and the
next day one was at the loom and the other at the wheel again. The
neighbors talked about the curse with horror; in their minds a fabric
of sad fate was spun from the bitter words.

The Knowles sisters never had worn silk gowns and they never would.
Sometimes Hannah or Betsey would stealthily look over the chest in one
or the other's absence. One day when Betsey was very old and her mind
had grown feeble, she tied her own India silk handkerchief about her
neck, but they never used the other two. They aired the wedding suit
once every spring as long as they lived. They were both too old and
forlorn to make up the India mull. Nobody knows how many times they
took everything out of the heavy old clamped box, and peered into
every nook and corner to see if there was not a single gol