re," said Miss Elizabeth, quietly. "People are very stupid.
They don't know what will freshen themselves up. They think the
trouble is with the confectionery, and so they try macaroon and
pistachio instead of lemon and vanilla. Fresh people are better than
fresh flavors. But I think we had everything fresh to-night. What a
beautiful old home-y house it is!"

"And what a home-y family!" said Doctor John Hautayne.

"_We_ have an old home-y house," said Miss Pennington, suddenly, "with
landscape-papered walls and cosey, deep windows and big chimneys. And
we don't half use it. Doctor Hautayne, I mean to have a party! Will
you stay and come to it?"

"Any time within my two months' leave," replied Doctor Hautayne, "and
with very great pleasure."

"So she will have it before very long," said Leslie, telling us about
the talk the next day.

It! Well, when Miss Pennington took up a thing she _did_ take it up!
That does not come in here, though,--any more of it.

The Penningtons are very proud people. They have not a very great deal
of money, like the Haddens, and they are not foremost in everything
like the Marchbankses; somehow they do not seem to care to take the
trouble for that; but they are so _established_; it is a family like
an old tree, that is past its green branching time, and makes little
spread or summer show, but whose roots reach out away underneath, and
grasp more ground than all the rest put together.

They live in an old house that is just like them. It has not a
new-fashioned thing about it. The walls are square, plain brick,
painted gray; and there is a low, broad porch in front, and then
terraces, flagged with gray stone and bordered with flower-beds at
each side and below. They have peacocks and guinea-hens, and more
roses and lilies and larkspurs and foxgloves and narcissus than
flowers of any newer sort; and there are great bushes of box and
southernwood, that smell sweet as you go by.

Old General Pennington had been in the army all his life. He was a
captain at Lundy's Lane, and got a wound there which gave him a stiff
elbow ever after; and his oldest son was killed in Mexico, just after
he had been brevetted Major. There is a Major Pennington now,--the
younger brother,--out at Fort Vancouver; and he is Pen's father. When
her mother died, away out there, he had to send her home. The
Penningtons are just as proud as the stars and stripes themselves; and
their glory is off the selfsame piece.