The effect of what laudanum Eunice had taken faded, and her lethargy was replaced by an equally still, incredulous amazement.  She followed Jasper Penny about with the mechanical rigidity of a minute sleepwalker.  They went into a jewelry store beyond, with a square low bow window and white trimming, where he purchased a ring with a ruby, and small gold bracelets with locks and chains.  His restless desire was to clothe Eunice in money, to overwhelm her with gifts; yet, although an evident delight struggled through her stupefaction, he failed to get from the expenditure the release he sought.  A leaden sense of blood guiltiness persisted in him.  At Parkinson’s, the confectioner opposite the State House, he bought her syllabubs, a frozen rose cordial and black cake.  On leaving, he paused at the marble steps with a lantern on either side and awning drawn out over the pavement, considering the next move.  It should be toys—­a German doll, slate and coloured crayons and jumping-figures.  Then he took her back to his rooms at the Hotel.

Sitting in a stiff crimson chair opposite him, the doll clasped in straining fingers, and a flush of excitement on her sharp features, she presented an enormous difficulty.  What, justly, was he to do with her?  How could he provide for a reasonable happiness, a healthy, normal existence?  He decided coldly that he would prevent Essie Scofield’s influence from ever touching the child again.  Essie, he knew, was utterly without any warmth of motherhood.  She had solely and callously used their daughter to extort money from him.  But, he admitted to himself, neither had he any feeling of parentage for the small, lonely figure before him; nothing but a burning self-accusation, a lacerated pride.  His act proceeded entirely from his head in place of his heart.  For that very reason, Jasper Penny thought, he could give his daughter a greater measure of security.  He would see Stephen Jannan to-morrow and with the lawyer’s assistance get complete control of Eunice’s future.  He must alter his will.

None of this, however, assisted in solving the actual immediate necessity.  There was, certainly, Myrtle Forge; his mother, however she might silently suffer, protest, would ultimately accede in his wishes.  But it was a dreary place for a child, with only the companionship of old women.  He was, for the greater part, away in the interest of his widely scattered activities, forges, furnaces, nail factories and rolling mills.

He felt in anticipation the censure of the Penny connections that would rise like a wall and shut Eunice from the companionship of the other children, of the family, embittering her at what he had somewhere heard described as the formative period of growth.  His home, he decided, for the present at least, was an undesirable place for his daughter.