“And me, too?” said Penelope. “I want change awful bad.”
“Not a bit of you. I never saw a more ruddy, healthy-looking little girl in the whole course of my life.”
“I wonder what I could do to be paled down,” thought Penelope to herself; but she did not speak her thought aloud. “I mustn’t tell Aunt Sophy, that is plain. I must keep all I know about Paulie dark for the present. There’s an awful lot. There’s about the thimble, and—yes, I did see them all three. I’m glad I saw them. I won’t tell now, for I’d only be punished; but if I don’t tell, and pretend I’m going to, Paulie will have to pay me to keep silent. That will be fun.”
The days passed, and Pauline continued to look pale, and Miss Tredgold became almost unreasonably anxious about her. Notwithstanding Verena’s assurance that Pauline had the sort of complexion that often looked white in summer, the good lady was not reassured. There was something more than ordinary weakness and pallor about the child. There was an expression in her eyes which kept her kind aunt awake at night.
Now this most excellent woman had never yet allowed the grass to grow under her feet. She was quick and decisive in all her movements. She was the sort of person who on the field of battle would have gone straight to the front. In the hour of danger she had never been known to lose her head. She therefore lost no time in making arrangements to take Verena and Pauline to the seaside. Accordingly she wrote to a landlady she happened to know, and engaged some remarkably nice rooms at Easterhaze on the south coast. Verena and Pauline were told of her plans exactly a week after the birthday. Pauline had been having bad dreams; she had been haunted by many things. The look of relief on her face, therefore, when Miss Tredgold told her that they were to pack their things that day, and that she, Verena, and herself would start for Easterhaze at an early hour on the following morning, was almost beyond words.
“Why is you giving Pauline this great big treat?” asked Penelope.
“Little girls should be seen and not heard,” was Miss Tredgold’s remark.
“But this little girl wants to be heard,” replied the incorrigible child. “’Cos she isn’t very strong, and ’cos her face is palefied.”
“There is no such word as palefied, Penelope.”
“I made it. It suits me,” said Penelope.