“Wait a moment,” and Mr. Schriven touched a bell, and immediately the foreman appeared.

“Give this girl a place next Monday at the ribbon counter,” he said, in the quick staccato tones of one who is absolute and saves time even in the utterance of words.  “I also wish to see you two hours hence.”

The man bowed, as if all were a matter of course, but when he was alone with Belle he said sharply, “You think you got ahead of me.”

He would indeed have been the most malicious of dragons had not Belle’s smiling face and frank words disarmed him.

“I did get ahead of you, and you know it, but you are too much of a man to hold a grudge against a poor girl who has her bread to earn.  Now that I am under your charge I promise that I’ll do my best to please you.”

“Very well, then; we’ll see.  I’ll have my eye on you, and don’t you forget it.”

Mrs. Jocelyn and Mildred laughed, sighed, and shook their heads over Belle’s humorous account of her morning’s adventure.  They praised her motive, they congratulated her on her success, but her mother said earnestly, “My dear little girl, don’t get bold and unwomanly.  We had all better starve than come to that.  It would wound me to the heart if your manner should ever cause any one to think of you otherwise than as the pure-hearted, innocent girl that you are.  But alas!  Belle, the world is too ready to think evil.  You don’t know it yet at all.”

She knew it better than they thought.  There was one phase of her interview with Mr. Schriven that she had not revealed, well knowing that her gentle mother would be inexorable in her decision that the shop must not even be entered again.  The girl was rapidly acquiring a certain shrewd hardihood.  She was not given to sentiment, and was too young to suffer deeply from regret for the past.  Indeed she turned buoyantly toward the future, while at the same time she recognized that life had now become a keen battle among others in like condition.

“I don’t intend to starve,” she said to herself, “nor to bite off my own nose because the world is not just what mother and Millie think it ought to be.  Papa would be inclined to break that man’s head if I told him what he said and how he looked.  But what would come of it?  Papa would go to jail and we into the street.  Unless papa can get up in the world again very fast, Millie and I shall find that we have got to take care of ourselves and hold our tongues.  I hadn’t been around with mamma one day before I learned that much.  Mamma and Millie were never made to be working-women.  They are over-refined and high-toned, but I can’t afford too much of that kind of thing on three dollars a week.  I’m a ’shop lady’—­that’s the kind of lady I’m to be—­and I must come right down to what secures success without any nonsense.”