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Updated: September 10, 2025
"I should like to give you new shoes very much, but you know I have often told you I can't spend much on your clothes, and I'm afraid we must make the old ones do a little longer." So this was another drop of bitterness added to Pennie's little cup of troubles. It was not only that the shoes were shabby, but they fastened with a button and a strap.
Pennie was very tired of hearing that she and Ethel were just the same age, and it did not seem to her any reason at all that they should want to know each other. Ethel, too, looked unwilling to be forced into a friendship, as she came listlessly forward and sat down by Pennie's side. "Are you fond of dancing?" she inquired in a cold voice. "I don't know," said Pennie, "I never tried.
So the time went on, very slowly for Nancy just now, but at last the week ended and Saturday came. The house at Easney was merrier and more noisy than it had been for some time on the day of Pennie's return, but the house at Nearminster went back at once to its old gravity and silence. Had it always been so still and quiet? Miss Unity wondered.
They were as much shut out from all it had to give as those dusky inhabitants of another country with whose condition Nearminster had lately been concerned. Pennie's words occurred to Miss Unity. "I know Anchor and Hope Alley, and that makes it so much nicer." She looked down at her side where was Pennie?
Ethelwyn's advice, which might have been useful under these circumstances, was quite the reverse; for the suggestions she made were absurdly above Pennie's means, and only confusing to the mind. "I should buy that," she would say, pointing to something which was worth at least a shilling.
Now, amongst Pennie's listeners when she told her tales of what went on in the garret after nightfall, Ambrose was the one who heard with the most rapt attention and the most absolute belief.
Sometimes there was so little to put down that she had to make some reflections, or copy a piece of poetry to fill it up; but it was a comfort to her to think that some day she should read it over with Nancy and Ambrose. Meanwhile, this visit of Pennie's, which was to her a kind of exile, was a very different matter to Miss Unity.
In the cathedral town of Nearminster, ten miles from Easney, lived Pennie's godmother Miss Unity Cheffins, and it was Mr and Mrs Hawthorn's custom to pay her an annual visit of two or three days, taking each of the four elder children with them in turn.
Almost without knowing it she went aimlessly into her bed-room, and from there into the little pink-chintz room which had been Pennie's. Betty had already made it so neat and trim that it looked forlornly empty with no signs of its late owner.
After a visit to Nearminster, where Miss Unity's library consisted of rows and rows of solemn old brown volumes, Pennie's stories were chiefly religious and biographical, taken, with additional touches of her own, from the lives of bygone worthies.
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