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Penny. What a perfectly lovely child she is. I don’t wonder you feel you can’t part with her. And so good!”
    The last of all this was the best. Penny was being the authentic angel child, and she had gone down in the most miraculous way. It was too good to last, but just as well to begin with a buttered side. For this evening at least, Penny had done all the things which even the Victorian child was supposed to do-had said “Yes, please,” and “No, thank you,” had dropped no crumb on the floor, spilled no drip on the table, and had reserved for the privacy of the bath an enthusiastic appreciation of Miss Columba. “Wouldn’t she make a lovely big yelephant!” With a sleepy giggle Judy drifted out of waking thought.

chapter 6
    The sun shone next day. Penny could be loosed in the garden whilst Judy coped with the housework. There was going to be quite enough of it-she could see that. Early morning tea to all the bedrooms, but she didn’t have to collect the trays. The child from the village did that. Her name was Gloria Pell, and old Pell the gardener was her grandfather. Gloria had red hair, and a free and impudent tongue when out of earshot of the Robbinses, who had somehow managed to inspire her with awe. Judy had her till eleven o’clock, when she descended to the kitchen to be at Mrs. Robbins’ beck and call. She came at eight, and stayed until six.
    This first day she was being uppish and superior and showing Judy how, but friendly underneath.
    “It’s not a bad place if you don’t get across Mr. Robbins. He’s a one, he is-and Mrs. Robbins too. But she’s a lovely cook. My mum says it’s a opportunity, and I’ve got to watch and see how she does everything. My mum says there’s going to be good money in cooking. My Auntie Ethel, she cooks for one of these British Restaurants, and she says they’re going to be all the thing. But I dunno. My Auntie Mabel says my hair ’ud be just right for me to go in for the hairdressing line- waves up lovely with a curler or two, only Mrs. Robbins makes me brush it flat when I come of a morning. A shame, I call it. I bet she couldn’t get her hair to curl, not if she took the kitchen poker to it.”
    The house was big and rambling. Behind the Victorian glazed passage was an eighteenth-century façade, and behind that a perfect rabbit-warren of rooms on different levels, with steps going up and steps coming down, and passages all over the place. A lot of the rooms were empty. Judy said to herself, “The housemaid’s nightmare!” But it fascinated her all the same. One fairly level corridor ran right and left from the top of the stairs.
    Gloria, full of importance, pointed out the room where the ceiling had fallen.
    “It’s in ever such a mess, but I can’t show you, because Mr. Roger’s locked the door and taken away the key. He’s moved in next door. This is the best bedroom, on the other side of the one where the ceiling’s down. Mr. Pilgrim’s room it was. And the ceiling is all the same as the one that come down. I shouldn’t wonder if it wasn’t any too safe either. Too heavy by half, my mum says, with all those dancing girls and bunches of flowers-and not too decent, she says. She used to be under-housemaid here before she married my dad. And look at the staff they kept then! Mr. and Mrs. Robbins were here same as they are now-evergreens my mum calls them. And there was a kitchen-maid, and a house-parlour under Mr. Robbins, and a head housemaid, and my mum, and a woman to scrub, and a boy for the boots and knives.”
    Judy contemplated the big room, and felt glad she would not have to do it every day. There were acres of old-fashioned Brussels carpet and a great deal of monumental Victorian furniture. But the bed was much older-a huge eighteenth-century four-poster, stripped of its curtains now, but with what looked like the original valance showing just how heavy and gloomy they must have been. The colour had gone away to a rusty brown, but