Pete looked at her thoughtfully. Then he carefully drew back the necklace. The price tag was visible to him but not to her. How could he tell her？ The trusting look of her blue eyes smote3 him like the pain of an old wound. “Just a minute,” he said, and turned toward the back of the store. Over his shoulder he called, “What’s your name？” He was very busy about something. “Jean Grace.”
When Pete returned to where Jean Grace waited, a package lay in his hand, wrapped in scarlet paper and tied with a bow of green. “There you are,” he said shortly, “Don’t lose it on the way home.”
She smiled happily over her shoulder as she ran out the door. Through the window he watched her go, while desolation flooded his thoughts. Something about Jean Grace and her string of beads had stirred him to the depths of a grief that would not stay buried. The child’s hair was wheat yellow, her eyes sea blue, and once upon a time, not long before, Pete had been in love with a girl with hair of that same yellow and with eyes just as blue. And the turquoise necklace was to have been hers.
But there had come a rainy night—a truck skidding on a slippery road—and the life was crushed out of his dream. Since then, Pete had lived too much with his grief in solitude. He was politely attentive to customers, but after hours his world seemed irrevocably4 empty. He was trying to forget in a self-pitying haze that deepened day by day. The blue eyes of Jean Grace jolted him into acute remembrance of what he had lost. The pain of it made him recoil from the exuberance of holiday shoppers. During the next ten days trade was brisk; chattering women swarmed in, fingering trinkets, trying to bargain. When the last customer had gone, late on Christmas Eve, he sighed with relief. It was over for another year. But for Pete the night was not quite over.
The door opened and a young woman hurried in. With