“It is not that,” he said grimly, a tangible hurt sharpening within; “but something that cannot be gone into, with you.”  She turned away immediately.  “I will send for her,” she replied.  They stood facing but mutually avoiding each other’s gaze while Eunice was being fetched.  “Her things have already come from the hotel,” Miss Brundon proceeded.  “Where shall I send them?” Eunice broke in with a shrill protest.  “Do I have to go?  I don’t want to.”  Her face was scarlet with revolt.  “I can walk up and down 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 transportation—­the echo of the whip cracking over the mules that drew the coaches across the covered viaduct, the labouring stationary engine and their slow ascent beyond.  They saw, lining the river, a cemetery elevated starkly against the sky; and followed a canal by a broken, black flood between snowy banks.