"I don't know," she again repressed her own desire; "perhaps they will
have to go back to Annapolis--don't ask me why--but they hope to sail
from Philadelphia in a week or so. She has marvellous clothes, and I
asked her if she would send me some babies from London. You know what
they are, Howat--little wooden dolls to show off the fashion; but she
made a harrowing joke, right in front of father and Mrs. Forsythe. The
things she says are just beyond description; it seems that it's all
right to talk anyway now if you call it classic. And she has fans with
pictures and rhymes on, honestly--" words apparently failed her.

Howat laughed. "Little Innocence," he said. He fell silent, thinking of
their mother. The court, he knew, had been her right, too, by birth; and
he wondered if, with the reminder of Mrs. Winscombe and her reflections
of St. James, she regretted her marriage and removal to the Province.
She was essentially lady, while Gilbert Penny had been the son of a
small country squire. He had seen a profile of his father as a young
man, at the time he had first met Isabel Kingsfrere Howat. It was a
handsome profile, perhaps a shade heavy, but admirably balanced and
stamped with decisive power. He had characteristically invested almost
his last shilling in a tract of eight hundred acres in Pennsylvania and
the passage of himself and his bride to the Province.

It was natural for men so to adventure, but Howat thought of Isabel
Penny with, perhaps, the only marked admiration he felt for any being.
There had been a period, short but strenuous, of material difficulties,
in which the girl--she had been hardly a woman in years--entirely
unprepared for such a different activity, had been finely competent and
courageous. This had not endured long because Gilbert Penny had been
successful almost from the first day of his landing in a new world.
Chance letters had enlisted the confidence of David Forsythe, a Quaker