“Has she?” said Nancy. “Then let me tell you she has not a very nice way of showing it. Now, Paulie, no more beating about the bush. What’s up? Your eyes are red; you have a great smear of ink on your forehead; and your hands—my word! for so grand a young lady your hands aren’t up to much, my dear.”
“I have got into trouble,” said Pauline. “I didn’t do my lessons properly yesterday; I couldn’t—I had a headache, and everything went wrong. So this morning I could not say any of them when Aunt Sophia called me up, and she put me into Punishment Land. You know, don’t you, that I am soon to have a birthday?”
“Oh, don’t I?” interrupted Nancy. “Didn’t a little bird whisper it to me, and didn’t that same little bird tell me exactly what somebody would like somebody else to give her? And didn’t that somebody else put her hand into her pocket and send—— Oh, we won’t say any more, but she did send for something for somebody’s birthday. Oh, yes, I know. You needn’t tell me about that birthday, Pauline Dale.”
“You are good,” said Pauline, completely touched. She wondered what possible thing Nancy could have purchased for her. She had a wild desire to know what it was. She determined then and there, in her foolish little heart, that nothing would induce her to quarrel with Nancy.
“It is something that you like, and something that will spite her,” said the audacious Nancy. “I thought it all out, and I made up my mind to kill two birds with one stone. Now to go on with the pretty little story. We didn’t please aunty, and we got into trouble. Proceed, Paulie pet.”
“I didn’t learn my lessons. I was cross, as I said, and headachy, and Aunt Sophia said I was to be made an example of, and so she sent me to Punishment Land for twenty-four hours.”
“Oh, my dear! It sounds awful. What is it?”
“Why, none of my sisters are to speak to me, and I am only to walk in the north walk.”
“Is this the north walk?” asked Nancy, with a merry twinkle in her black eyes.
“Of course it isn’t. She may say what she likes, but I’m not going to obey her. But the others won’t speak to me. I can’t make them. And I am to take my meals by myself in the schoolroom, and I am to go to bed at seven o’clock.”