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The Squire was sitting at his old cherry desk. He turned around and looked at Patience sharply from under his shaggy, overhanging brows.

Then he fumbled in his pocket and brought something out–it was the sixpence. Then he began talking. Patience could not have told what he said. Her mind was entirely full of what she had to say. Somehow she stammered out the story: how she had been afraid to go to Nancy Gookin’s, and how she had lost the sixpence her uncle had given her, and how Martha had said she told a fib. Patience trembled and gasped out the words, and curtesied, once in a while, when the Squire said something.

“Come here,” said he, when he had sat for a minute or two, taking in the facts of the case.

To Patience’s utter astonishment, Squire Bean was laughing, and holding out the sixpence.

“Have you got the palm-leaf string?”

“Yes, sir,” replied Patience, curtesying.

“Well, you may take this home, and put in the palm-leaf string, and use it for a marker in your book–but don’t you spend it again.”

“No, sir.” Patience curtesied again.

“You did very wrong to spend it, very wrong. Those sixpences are not given to you to spend. But I will overlook it this once.”

The Squire extended the sixpence. Patience took it, with another dip of her little skirt. Then he turned around to his desk.

Patience waited a few minutes. She did not know whether she was dismissed or not. Finally the Squire begun to add aloud: “Five and five are ten,” he said, “ought, and carry the one.”

He was adding a bill. Then Patience stole out softly. Mrs. Squire Bean was waiting in the kitchen. She gave her a great piece of plum-cake and kissed her.

“He didn’t hurt you any, did he?” said she.

“No, ma’am,” said Patience, looking with a bewildered smile at the sixpence.

That night she tied in the palm-leaf strand again, and she put the sixpence in her Geography-book, and she kept it so safely all her life that her great-grandchildren have seen it.