“She has a mouth full of them,” said Marion hastily. He could not bear that his lady should be thought in want of a dowry, when she was a fortune in herself. “And those are not her only jewels.” He reached, and, taking her hand, gathered together the little pink finger-tips like a bunch of rosebuds. “She has ten rubies fit for a crown,” he said, and touched his lips to the clustered fingers, while the girl laughed and blushed.
Mr. Vane seemed to be struck with a sudden recollection. He put his hand to his forehead and considered, then rose from his chair. “Wait a minute,” he said, and went into his own room, where they heard him opening his trunk, and searching about in it. Presently he returned with a tiny morocco case. “It is the merest chance in the world that I did not leave this in America,” he said. “I did not dream of bringing it. Bianca’s mother left a pair of ear-rings for the girl who should marry first.”
He opened the case and took them out—two large, pear-shaped pearls, of exquisite lustre, hanging from a gold leaf, on which a small, pure diamond glistened like a speck of water.
“And you could have such a treasure with you, and never say anything about it!” the Signora exclaimed. “O the insensibility of men! And these girls never saw the pearls before!”
She fastened the jewels in the pretty ears they were destined for. “These are two gems you forgot in your enumeration, Marion,” she said. “And, by the way, how fitting it is that, when the ears are shells, there should be pearls hung in them!”
“I’m glad you think them so pretty,” Mr. Vane said with compunction. “I really never did think of them before. Perhaps it was very stupid of me.”
“On the contrary, it was very wise of you, papa,” Isabel said. “They are a great pleasure to us all now; but if we had known of them, I should now feel as if they had been taken away from me.”
“When you are engaged, you shall have a pair as pretty, if they are to be found,” her father said.
They drank Bianca’s health; and, the talk still running on gems, Marion told an incident of a ring which a friend of his had lost in the snow, in some part of Germany, as he stood looking down on the town from a hill outside. Several months afterward, going to the same spot, he saw the ring at the top of a little plant. The first sprout had come up inside it as it lay on the ground, and, growing, had lifted it, till it stood almost a foot high, glistening round the green stem.