Once it darted into her erratic little head that she would run away, walk miles and miles, sleep close to the hedges at night, receive drinks of milk from good-natured cottagers, and finally appear a dusty, travel-stained, very sick little girl at Aunt Sophia’s lodgings at Easterhaze. But the difficulties in the way of such an undertaking were beyond even Pen’s heroic spirit. Notwithstanding her vinegar and her suffering, she was still rosy—indeed, her cheeks seemed to get plumper and rounder than ever. She hated to think of the vinegar she had taken in vain; she hated to remember Betty and the tidy and pin-cushion she had given her.
Meanwhile the days passed quickly and the invitation she pined for did not come. What was to be done? Suddenly it occurred to her that, if she could only become possessed of certain facts which she now suspected, she might be able to fulfil her own darling desire. For Pen knew more than the other girls supposed. She was very angry with Pauline for not confiding in her on Pauline’s birthday, and at night she had managed to keep awake, and had risen softly from her cot and stood in her white night-dress by the window; and from there she had seen three little figures creeping side by side across the lawn—three well-known little figures. She had very nearly shouted after them; she had very nearly pursued them. But all she really did was to creep back into bed and say to herself in a tone of satisfaction:
“Now I knows. Now I will get lots of pennies out of Paulie.”
She dropped into the sleep of a happy child almost as she muttered the last words, but in the morning she had not forgotten what she had seen.
On a certain day shortly after Penelope had recovered from her very severe fit of indigestion, she was playing on the lawn, making herself, as was her wont, very troublesome, when Briar, looking up from her new story-book, said in a discontented voice:
“I do wish you would go away, Penelope. You worry me awfully.”
Penelope, instead of going away, went and stood in front of her sister.
“Does I?” she said. “Then I am glad.”
“You really are a horrid child, Pen. Patty and Adelaide, can you understand why Pen is such a disagreeable child?”
“She is quite the most extraordinary child I ever heard of in the whole course of my life,” said Adelaide. “The other night, when she woke up with a pain in her little tum-tum, she shouted, ‘Vinegar! vinegar!’ She must really have been going off her poor little head.”