own the room with a book on my head, while another little
girl had to be all done with a board to her back."

Jasper Penny wondered if he would see Miss Brundon again soon. The last
was an afterthought bred by the realization that he could not permit her
to depart absolutely from his life. There was a great deal that he, a
rich and influential man of practical affairs, might do for her. He was
certain that Susan Brundon needed exactly the assistance he could give;
probably people robbed her, traded callously on her unsuspicious nature.
Yet, when the moment came to leave, he could think of nothing to say
beyond the banality of looking for her at the Jannans'.

"I go out very little," she told him; "the work here absorbs me; and,
unfortunately, my eyes are not strong. They require constant rest." He
expressed regret once more for any disturbance he might have caused;
and, after hesitating awkwardly, left with Eunice hanging fretfully at
his hand. What, in God's name, was he to do with the child? He walked
slowly, his face half lost in the fur of his overcoat, oblivious, in his
concentration on the difficulties of her situation, of Eunice
progressing discontentedly at his side. A petulant complaint rose at
intervals to an audible sob. Looking down, as the sobs threatened to
become a continuous crying, he saw the top of the velvet bonnet and her
diminutive hands in scarlet knitted mitts. He would have to stop
dragging her from place to place; a suitable position for the present
was all he hoped for now. There must be other institutions, larger and
farther away, to which Eunice could be sent. He had a vague memory of
such a place somewhere on the Delaware, was it at Burlington?

But he could not continue living with his daughter at Sanderson's Hotel.
Jasper Penny decided that he would take her that afternoon to the house
of the head machinist of his nail works at Jaffa, the town that, its
beginning growing largely out of the Penny industries, lay a scant mile
from Myrtle Forge. Speever was a superior man; his wife, a robust
Cornish woman in a crisp apron, would give Eunice an energetic and
proper care.

A thin, flexible mantle of snow lay over the drab earth, sweeping up to
a Grecian marble edifice, making more dreary the bulk of the Eastern
Penitentiary and foundation of Girard College, and emphasizing the
winter desertion of the reaches of the Fairmount Water Works. She soon
grew absorbed in the various aspects of their