orgot where I was now--oh, the manager, ah yes! Well, the
manager said, "We shall be very happy to have the stones made in any
design you may select"--jewellery, by the way, seems to exercise a most
refining influence upon the manners: this man had the deportment of a
duke--"you may select," he said; "but of course I need not tell you that
none of these stones are genuine."'

'Not genuine!' cried Aunt Margarine excitedly. 'They must be--he was
lying!'

'West-end jewellers never lie,' said Dick; 'but naturally, when he said
that, I told him I should like to have some proof of his assertion.
"Will you take the risk of testing?" said he. "Test away, my dear man!"
said I. So he brought a little wheel near the emerald--"whizz!" and away
went the emerald! Then he let a drop of something fall on the ruby--and
it fizzled up for all the world like pink champagne. "Go on, don't mind
_me_!" I told him, so he touched the diamond with an electric
wire--"phit!" and there was only something that looked like the ash of a
shocking bad cigar. Then the pearls--and they popped like so many
air-balloons. "Are you satisfied?" he asked.

'"Oh, perfectly,"' said I, "you needn't trouble about the horse-shoe pin
now. Good evening," and so I came away, after thanking him for his very
amusing scientific experiments.'

'And do you believe that the jewels are all shams, Dick?--do you
really?'

'I think it so probable that nothing on earth will induce me to offer a
single one for sale. I should never hear the last of it at the bank. No,
mater, dear little Priscilla's sparkling conversation may be unspeakably
precious from a moral point of view, but it has no commercial value.
Those jewels are bogus--shams every stone of them!'

Now, all this time our heroine had been sitting unperceived in a corner
behind a window-curtain, reading 'The Wide, Wide World,' a work which
she was never weary of perusing. Some children would have come forward
earlier, but Priscilla was never a forward child, and she remained as
quiet as a little mouse up to the moment when she could control her
feelings no longer.

'It isn't true!' she cried passionately, bursting out of her retreat and
confronting her cousin; 'it's cruel and unkind to say my jewels are
shams! They are real--they are, they _are_!'

'Hullo, Prissie!' said her abandoned cousin; 'so you combine
jewel-dropping with eaves-dropping, eh?'

'How dare you!' cried Aunt Margarine, almost beside herself, 'y