ENNY tied the ribbon in a little bow on top of her head and walked across to the window. Standing there in her petticoat, she looked first down into the place they called the courtyard. She always looked out of her window this way-first down at the straight graveled walks between the scraggly flower beds and thin Iawns. She would look at everything in the courtyard before she would let her eyes begin to follow the widest walk. This one went straight away from the gray stone buildings, and Penny would follow it slowly with her eyes. If anyone was walking along it, or if the big boys were working with wheelbarrows or raking the gravel, she would not look at them. Instead she would pretend that the walk was empty and that she, alone, was walking along it, walking away from the buildings.

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Penny followed the walk with her eyes until it came to the high iron gates. To her these gates were like a canyon, for they made the only break in the solid brick wall. The gates were nearly always closed, and they were closed now, so her eyes climbed up them until she saw the letters made of wrought iron which arched over the two tall gates. Penny always read the word backward because the sign faced away from the buildings.
  E G A N A H PRO, she read. She and Nick, her brother, would never say that they lived in an orphanage. They lived in an eganahpro, and they weren't, orphans; they were eganaps.
  Penny made her eyes look at the sign for a long time before she would let them leap beyond it. She would look then straight over the trees and the road winding over to the town. She would ignore the huge oaks with Spanish moss hanging like dirty gray laundry from every limb. Her eyes would go swiftly beyond the town, beyond the church steeples sticking up above the green of the trees, until she could see the ocean.
  As Penny looked at the sun on the sea now she thought, "I'm twelve years old today. This is my birthday and nobody knows it. Except, maybe, Nick. He might know it because I never forget his birthday and I always give him a present."
  Then she thought, as a faraway breeze riffled the sunlight on the sea, "I bet I've looked at the sea a million times. When I first came here I couldn't see it because I

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was only four years old and they put me in the Baby House and I couldn't see anything but trees. But when I to be six years old they gave me this room, and so for six years I've been looking out of this window at the ocean. Sometimes I've looked out of the window a hundred times in one day. I bet I've looked at it more than a million times."
  The iron gates swinging open distracted her, and she watched a car coming slowly up the wide drive. It was a shiny car and she could look almost directly down on when it stopped at the wide steps and the man and woman got out. Penny looked at them carefully and decided that they were nice. The lady had on a black dress with a red flower at her shoulder, and she had a little hat with another red flower on it. The man was tall and the toes of his shoes were very shiny. Soon they would come back to the car with one of the children from the Baby House. The car would drive out of the gates and the one from the Baby House would never come back through the gates again.
  Penny looked across the courtyard at the rows of windows in the Boys' House. She knew exactly which one was Nick's, but the sun was behind the house now and his window was just a black rectangle in the gray wall. She wondered what Nick was doing, but he didn't come to the window, so at last Penny turned back into the bare little room and went on dressing.
  When she was finished she stood in front of the small

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mirror and looked at herself. Outside her window she heard the car's tires crunching on the gravel, but she didn't go over to watch it go out of the gates.
  Whispering to her reflection in the mirror, Penny said, "I can't ever go out of those gates-not for good. Nick can go with that Mrs. Wertz if he wants to. He doesn't have to stay here. But nobody will ever adopt me."
  But Nick did not like Mrs. Wertz. "She looks like a frog," Nick had said after the interview was over.
And Mrs. Wertz lived on a farm. She didn't live anywhere near the sea.
  Penny felt the lump beginning to swell in her throat, and as she looked at her face in the mirror it began to get misty through the tears, and the red hair ribbon on top of her head became just a blotch of color and her wideapart blue eyes were like pools of blue in her brown face.
Penny made herself stop crying because it was almost time for the bell. She wiped her eyes on the hem of her petticoat and blew her nose. Then she looked in the mirror again. She had a serious, wistful face, but when she smiled, as she made herself do now, the corners of her mouth curved upward, and her dark blue eyes seemed to have little lights in them. For the past month she had been assigned to the flower gardens, so her face was suntanned and her almost blond hair had been burned to a light gold color after days of working outdoors.
  When the bell rang Penny joined the other children as they came streaming out of the various buildings. She

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saw Nick come out of the Boys' House by himself and she waited for him under the water-oak tree.
  Nick was only nine and a half, but he was bigger than some of the boys who were ten or even eleven. Penny watched him as he came toward her and thought how much like a grown-up man he looked. He wasn't scrawny -all legs and arms and joints-like most of the boys. He was compact; his shoulders were wide and his hips small, and he seemed to be all in one piece, not with one arm swinging off one way, the other another, and his legs wandering around.
  Anyone could tell they were brother and sister because Nick had the same wide-set blue eyes and the same firm big mouth with upturning corners and the same wistfulness. His hair was more sandy-colored than Penny's, and his face was rounder.
  " 'Lo," he said when he got to the tree.
  " 'Lo."
  "You still in the flower garden?" Nick asked.
  Penny nodded.
  "They assigned me to the kitchen for another month," Nick said angrily. Then he paused and said in a low whisper, "Just for that I'm going to run away."
  "How?" Penny asked. She wasn't very interested because the eganaps all said they'd run away, but whenever one actually did he was always caught in a little while and brought back in disgrace.
  Nick looked all around and came closer to her. "I've got it all planned."

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Penny shook her head slowly. "They'll catch you and you'll have to walk the courtyard for a month-maybe more."
  "They won't catch me," Nick said angrily.
  Penny shrugged. "Anybody can run away. Only there's no place to run away to where they can't find you. You remember Pansy Brown who used to live on my floor? She ran away one time when we were marching to the movies. She tried to sleep under the porch of a house, and a lot of goats came under there too. Then it rained on her. And they caught her the next morning and made her come back. She caught a terrible cold and was in the dispensary for a long time. And after she got out she had to walk the courtyard just the same."
  "I'm not going to sleep with any goats," Nick said. 
"I'm going to sea. I'm going to be a sailor. Go 'way away where they won't ever find me."
  Penny looked toward the sea, but she couldn't see it when she was down in the courtyard, She sat down with her back against the tree, and Nick sat down beside her.
"I wish I could be a sailor," Penny said quietly, "I'd like it."
  "I'm going to be," Nick said. "I'm not going to work in that old kitchen all my life."
  Penny hardly heard him. "I bet I've looked at the ocean a million times," she said.
  "I can't even see it," Nick said. "All I see out of my win-
dow is the Girls' House and some trees. I tried to swap

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rooms with Melonhead because he doesn't like to look at it, but they wouldn't let me."
 "I remember," Penny said. "Yesterday a big sailboat came in. The sails were so white."
  "If I could get on a sailboat they couldn't ever find me, could they, Penny?" he asked.
  "Nick," Penny said sternly, "you forget about running away, hear? There's no use even trying to."
  Nick scowled at her. "If I stay here with you I'll have to work in the kitchen all the time. I won't even get out in the courtyard any more."
  Penny felt the lump rising in her throat as she said slowly, "You can go with that Mrs. Wertz, Nick. She wants to adopt you.
  "That's what I'm going to do," Nick said calmly. "But I'm not going to be adopted by that old woman. She hasn't got any colors in her eyes."
  "If you go you have to be," Penny said, amazed.
  Nick shook his head firmly. "No, they said I could go on a two-week tryout, and if Mrs. Wertz doesn't like me she can bring me back. Only," Nick said, his voice dropping to a whisper, "I'm going to run away from her before then."
  Penny stared at her little brother, and Nick scowled harder.
  "It isn't like running away from here," he said. "It's different when you run away before you've even been adopted. Isn't it different, Penny?"

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  "I guess so," Penny said slowly. "If somebody doesn't love you I guess it's all right to run away from them." .
  "That'll give me a head start," Nick said, excitement rising in his voice. "Nobody here will know I'm gone for a long time."
  Penny looked at her brother in amazement.  "Are you really going to, Nick?" she asked.
  "I said I was," Nick said, his voice a little angry. "I'm getting older every day and I want to be a sailor." Then he hesitated a moment and in a different voice asked,     "You think I ought to, Penny?"
  "I don't know, Nick. It's awful dangerous. It scares me just to think of it."
  "Me too!" Nick said, his voice low. Then he added loudly, "But I'm going to do it!"
  Penny leaned back against the tree and thought of the whole wide world outside those iron gates. She had never felt as sad as this in all her life.
  In a whisper Penny said, "I'll miss you, Nick."
  Nick turned his head away. "Don't blubber," he said.
  Penny stiffened. "I'm not blubbering. I was just being -polite."
  Suddenly Nick dug down into his pants pocket and then held his hand out toward her, the fingers tightly closed.
  "Here's a birthday present," he said stiffly. "I made it all by myself." He opened his fingers over her hand. "I've been working on it for more than a month."

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He dropped into Penny's hand a little heart-shaped - piece of gray limestone. At the V of the heart there was a hole with a piece of white string strung through it.
  "You can wear it around your neck if you want to," Nick said.
  Penny turned the little heart over and saw her initials scratched into the soft gray stone. "P. B." -Penelope Brown.
  "It's beautiful, Nick," she said softly. "It's the beautifullest thing I ever saw."
  "It's just a piece of rock," Nick said.
  "But it's a heart." Penny put the string around her neck and turned the stone over so the initials were outside. "I'll wear it all my life," she said, holding it in her hand.
  "When I get rich I'll get a gold chain for it," Nick said. "When I get to be a sailor I'll go to India or Africa or someplace and get a gold chain and bring it back to you.
  Penny let the little heart go and felt it lying against her throat. "Nick," she said, almost whispering, "I'll go with you.
  Nick turned to look at her. "You mean-now?"
Penny nodded.
  "Run away?" Nick asked slowly.
  She nodded again.
  "From here?"
  "Yes."

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  "When I run away?" He was whispering.
  "Yes. You sneak back here and open the gates. They open from the outside. Then we'll run away together," Penny said.
  "All right," Nick said, his voice almost soundless.
  Penny suddenly felt frightened at what they were going to do. Then she thought, "This is the last chance we'll ever have to get out of this place. No one else will ever want me, and Nick is getting older all the time. The nice people only want the little babies. If we don't go now when we've made up our minds to go we never will. We've got to go this time."
  "All right," Penny said. "Let's go tell them you'll go on the tryout with Mrs. Wertz."

  The high iron gates closed slowly behind the muddy pick-up truck, and Mrs. Wertz drove away with Nick sitting beside her on the hard, slippery seat. Nick looked back for a moment at the arched sign, but it looked different when it was spelled right -ORPHANAGE. It wasn't EGANAHPRO any more.
  Then Mrs. Wertz took a fork in the road which led directly away from the sea, She hadn't said a word since she had started, but after she drove down the road for a while she suddenly said, "If we understand each other from the very beginning we'll have a happy little family."
  Nick nodded.
  "I believe in hard work and plenty of it," Mrs. Wertz

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said. "And when the work is finished, then playtime." 
  Nick nodded again.
  "You will have your own little tasks to do each day," Mrs. Wertz said. "I don't believe in going around haphazardly. And each little task must be done and done right before you go on to the next. On my little farm there's plenty of work for all-cows to be fed and milked, chickens and ducks, the table garden, and of course keeping the house neat and clean, and keeping the barn sanitary. If the little hands are kept occupied, then they don't get into trouble."
  Nick slowly turned his head so that he could look back down the road toward the ocean. But he couldn't see it and he waited, hoping that they would come to an open place where the trees wouldn't be in the way.
  "Are you listening to me, Nicholas?" Mrs. Wertz asked.
  Nick jerked his head around.
  "Yes, ma'am," he said.
  "When I speak to you you must always listen," Mrs.
Wertz said. "Pay careful attention."
  "Yes, ma'am,", Nick said.
  They passed another fork in the road, and Nick read the names on the pointing arrows. Then he thought, "I won't have any trouble finding the way back. All I have to do is go toward where the sun is and I'll come to the orphanage after a while." He wondered if it would be hard to get the gates open so Penny could slip out.
 The truck rattled on down the road.

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