"Well, you may take this home, and put in the palm-leaf string, and use it for a marker in your book—but don't you spend it again."
"No, sir." Patience curtesied again.
"You did very wrong to spend it, very wrong. Those sixpences are not given to you to spend. But I will overlook it this once."
The Squire extended the sixpence. Patience took it, with another dip of her little skirt. Then he turned around to his desk.
Patience waited a few minutes. She did not know whether she was dismissed or not. Finally the Squire begun to add aloud: "Five and five are ten," he said, "ought, and carry the one."
He was adding a bill. Then Patience stole out softly. Mrs. Squire Bean was waiting in the kitchen. She gave her a great piece of plum-cake and kissed her.
"He didn't hurt you any, did he?" said she.
"No, ma'am," said Patience, looking with a bewildered smile at the sixpence.
That night she tied in the palm-leaf strand again, and she put the sixpence in her Geography-book, and she kept it so safely all her life that her great-grandchildren have seen it.