"One thing I'm determined on, though, beforehand," cried Zack,--"the
clasp. The clasp shall be a serpent, with turquoise eyes, and a
carbuncle tail; and all our initials scored up somehow on his scales.
Won't that be splendid? I should like to surprise Madonna with it this
very evening."
("You shall never give it to her, if _I_ can help it," grumbled Mrs.
Peckover, still soliloquizing under her breath. "If anything in this
world can bring her ill-luck, it will be a Hair Bracelet!")
These last words were spoken with perfect seriousness; for they were
the result of the strongest superstitious conviction.
From the time when the Hair Bracelet was found on Madonna's mother,
Mrs. Peckover had persuaded herself--not unnaturally, in the absence of
any information to the contrary--that it had been in some way connected
with the ruin and shame which had driven its unhappy possessor forth as
an outcast, to die amongst strangers. To believe, in consequence, that
a Hair Bracelet had brought "ill-luck" to the mother, and to derive
from that belief the conviction that a Hair Bracelet would therefore
also bring "ill-luck" to the child, was a perfectly direct and
inevitable deductive process to Mrs. Peckover's superstitious mind.
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