The girl glanced involuntarily at Miss Leavitt’s hand, which was clenched into a fist.  In it was a crisp-looking new greenback on which at one end she thought she saw the word “Ten.”

Ten dollars!  The man had made Lily Leavitt a present of ten dollars, and she had accepted it!  Would he have tried to do the same with her, or would he have attempted to be even more generous if she had not been chaperoned by the grandmother of five?  Also, was it just the Christmas spirit, or had Lily done something special to earn the money?

CHAPTER XVIII

THE BIG BLUFF

Lily Leavitt’s gratitude was immense.  She was a changed girl from that moment.  Not that she ceased to like Earl Usher, who awkwardly resented her overtures and was boyishly ashamed of them, but her jealousy seemed, after the handing over of Mr. Logan, to lose its bitterness.

She no longer glared and talked “at” Miss Child, asking if she “wore her hair that way for a bet,” and “why some people wanted to take up all the room clerking in stores when they could get better money doing giantess stunts in a Bowery show?” Instead she did her best to make friends with Win and her smart little watchdog, Sadie Kirk.

She brought them presents of hothouse fruit and chocolates, which Win refused and Sadie nonchalantly accepted, wondering “where the Leavitt creature picked ’em up.  They didn’t grow on blackberry bushes, no fear.  And she wasn’t going to let ’em spoil!”

As the desperate days before Christmas raged furiously on, Win was still unable to guess Mr. Meggison’s real motive for putting her into the toy department.  Her duties were more exhausting than they had been downstairs That suggested penance.  On the other hand, they had more variety and amusement, for there were five hundred different kinds of toys to sell to five hundred different types of people.  That suggested benignity.

Perhaps, thought Sadie, Meggison wanted to see how much the new girl could stand.  Perhaps he wished to “sweat out of her” all the work of which she was capable, the full wage worth she could give to Peter Rolls before casting her aside forever.

Or—­it was just possible that, instead of exciting resentment she had won his respect by “cheeking” him.  That had been known to happen in the most unexpected, though now historic cases.  And girls who had awaited their discharge had been promoted, mounting slowly higher and higher over the bodies of those who fell by the wayside, until they had become head buyers, receiving ten thousand dollars a year and a trip to Paris every summer.

In any case, Win liked Toys better than Blouses, though Mr. Tobias (whose hair “left off where it began,” and who wore his eyes in bags) was a very “different proposition” from Fred Thorpe, the kind and handsome floorwalker who loved Dora Stein, yet was fair to her rivals.  If Tobias saw a young woman stop to breathe he came up and reminded her that this wasn’t a matinee—­they weren’t having a party that day nor serving five-o’clock tea.