"I haven't the money," he said plaintively.
"I'd pay my own."
That old look of suspicion flickered up in his eyes. "Where would you get it?"
"Well ... I could sell my sheep."
"Sell your sheep!" he echoed. "Why ... preposterous! Why the sheep are the best part of our capital!"
"My capital," corrected Pen.
"Certainly," he said stiffly. "But I'm your father I suppose. I have a right to prevent you doing anything so foolhardy. Just to gratify a momentary impulse. I forbid you to think of such a thing! Never speak of it again!"
"Oh, all right," said Pen, dropping the matter so quickly that a more perspicacious man might have guessed she had not dropped it at all. As a matter of fact as soon as breakfast was over she took the Sun-paper to her room and looked up the quotations for sheep and lambs on the Baltimore market. Prices were low, but there was no help for it. She fell to studying ways and means.
Later she was moving about the house setting things to rights and always planning, planning, when she heard a musical deep-toned ship's whistle from the river—the whistle of a stranger in those waters. She ran to the front windows and beheld a big yacht coming in from the bay. She was as slim and sheer as a pickerel with a piratical rake to her masts and funnel. The morning sun showed up her mahogany upper-works as red as blood, and dazzlingly picked out her polished brasses. A beauty! An anchor was let go with a mighty rattling of chain, and the yacht slowly came about in the stream.
Pen knew by intuition that her coming had something to do with the matter that filled all their minds, but pride forbade her running out of the house to find out. With a great effort of will she kept on about her work, possessing her soul in what patience she could.