“I can show her my pig,” said David.
“And the rabbits and the jackdaw and the owl,” added Ambrose.
“Oh, I don’t suppose she’ll care at all about such common things as pigs and rabbits,” said Pennie rather scornfully, for the very name of Ethelwyn had a sort of superior sound.
“Then she’ll be a stupid,” said Ambrose.
“Owdacious,” added David.
“Davie,” said Miss Grey, “where did you hear that word?”
“Andrew says it,” answered David triumphantly; “he says Antony grows owdacious.”
A lively argument followed, for David could not be brought to understand for some time why Andrew’s expressions were not equally fit for little boys and gardeners. Ethelwyn was for the time forgotten by everyone except Pennie, who continued to think about her all that evening. Indeed, for days afterwards her mind was full of nothing else; she wondered what she was like, and how she would talk, and she had Ethelwyn so much on the brain that she could not keep her out of her head even in lesson time. She came floating across the pages of the History of England while Pennie was reading aloud, and caused her to make strange mistakes in the names of the Saxon kings.
“Ethelbert, not Ethelwyn, Pennie,” Miss Grey would say for the twentieth time, and then with a little impatient shake Pennie would wake up from her day-dreams, and try to fix her mind on the matter in hand. But it was really difficult, for those kings seemed to follow each other so fast, and to do so much the same things, and even to have names so much alike, that it was almost impossible to have clear ideas about them. Pennie’s attention soon wandered away again to a more attractive subject: Ethelwyn! it was certainly a nice name to have, and seemed to mean all sorts of interesting things; how small and poor the name of Pennie sounded after it! shortened to Pen, as it was sometimes, it was worse still. No doubt Ethelwyn would be pretty. She would have long yellow hair, Pennie decided, not plaited up in a pig-tail like her own and Nancy’s, but falling over her shoulders in a nice fluffy way like the Lady Dulcibella’s. Pennie often felt sorry that there was no fluffiness at all about her hair, or that of her brothers and sisters; their heads all looked so neat and tight, and indeed they could not do otherwise under Nurse’s vigorous treatment, for she went on the principle that anything rough was untidy. Even Dickie’s hair, which wanted to curl, was sternly checked, and kept closely cropped like a boy’s; it was only Cicely’s that was allowed at present to do as it liked and wave about in soft little rings of gold.
Pennie made her plans and thought her thoughts, and often went to bed with Ethelwyn’s imaginary figure so strongly before her that she had wonderful dreams. Ethelwyn took the shape of the “Fair One with the Golden Locks,” in the fairy book, and stood before her with yellow hair quite down to her feet—beautiful, gracious, smiling. Even in the daylight Pennie could not quite get rid of the idea, and so, long before she had seen her, the name of Ethelwyn came to mean, in her romantic little mind, everything that was lovely and desirable.