"That's enough of your misery. When I came in that door you started to move as spry as a kitten after its tail!"
At this moment the head of Theodo', Aunt Maria's sixth or thereabouts, appeared outside the kitchen window. Aunt Maria unseen by Pen silently and frantically waved him back, but his momentum was too great. He came on in with his foolish, engaging grin.
Pen whirled around.
"What are you doing in the house at this hour?" she demanded.
Theodo's face turned ashy, but he still grinned. "Ah ... Ah jes' come fo' watah," he stammered.
"And left your horses standing in the field!" stormed Pen. "You don't want water. It's only because you can't keep your trifling mind on your work for more than half an hour at a time. To-morrow is the first of June and you haven't got your ploughing done! And everybody else's corn is six inches high! Go back to your horses and let me hear no more of water!"
Theodo' slunk out.
But the storm did not really break until Pen, going to make her butter, found the broken paddle of her churn still unmended. She marched back through the kitchen, through the big pantry into the dining-room bearing the broken paddle like Nemesis. Aunt Maria's vast body heaved in silent chuckles.
"Boss gwine catch it now fo' sho'," she murmured, and waddling silently through the pantry, put her ear to the crack of the dining-room door.
She was not disappointed. Within the dining-room lightning played about the startled head of the elder Pendleton Broome. And indeed young Pen was sorely tried. Her father was an amiable incompetent who frittered away his time on a dozen unprofitable hobbies while his estate fell into ruin about him. Not his fault entirely of course, for it was a hopeless job to keep up twenty-five hundred acres without any money. And not an acre of it salable. To get the smallest things done about the place required an expenditure of energy from Pen sufficient to have won campaigns. For weeks her father had been promising to mend her churn. Even with a whole churn she made butter under the greatest difficulties, because by the time he had got round to repairing the ice house it was too late to put up ice. She reminded him of that now ... and of other things.