n, since she had meant nothing
more than to get a sight of the loved figure and then to go on her way.
Having satisfied herself that he was not in the store, a yearning desire
possessed her to enter the place where he every day walked--a place to
her invested with romance, haunted by his presence--a place to which her
thoughts often wandered as some stupid child stood by her side in the
little school-room spelling out his reading-lesson. She had not for
months entered the store--not since that evening when, in her poor
parlor, Christian Van Pelt, the rich young merchant, had looked into her
eyes with a look that thrilled her for many a day, and spoken some
nothings in tones that set her heart throbbing. Indeed, since that day
she had avoided passing the store, lest she might seem, even to herself,
to be seeking him. And yet her poor eyes and heart were ever seeking
him in the countless throngs that passed up and down the busy streets.

"I'll get my dress from his store," she said mentally. "I shall wear it
with the greater pleasure that he has handled it. My patronage will be
to him but as the drop to the ocean," she said with a little bitterness,
"but it will be a sweet thought to me that I have contributed even one
drop to the flood of his prosperity."

So she entered Christian Van Pelt's trade-palace, and said, in answer to
the smart clerk's look of inquiry, "I am looking for a silk that will do
for the evening and also for the street--something a little out of
style, perhaps, might answer."

"We have some bargains in such silks--elegant dress-patterns at a third
of what they cost us in Paris. Step this way;" and Mary found herself
going back and back through the spacious building, with her image
advancing to meet her.

In a few seconds the counter was strewn with silks at most enticing
figures, and the clerk showed them off to such advantage, gathering them
so dexterously into elegant folds, shifting them so skillfully in the
brilliant gas-light, persuading the lady, in the mean while, in such a
clever, lawyer-like way: "These cost us in Paris three times the money I
am offering them for, and they are but very little _passe_; there is an
extraordinary demand for them; they are going like wildfire; country
merchants are ordering them by the score; we sent eighty pieces to
Chicago, to one house, yesterday, and fifty patterns to Omaha this
morning; one hundred and ten we last week shipped to the South; the
whole lo