Miss Trigg was also a lonely person; perhaps that was why she showed some appreciation for “Miss Nobody from Nowhere.” Sometimes in the long summer vacation she and Nancy were alone at the school. That drew the two together a little. But Miss Trigg was a spinster of very, very uncertain age—saving that she couldn’t be young!—and it was the more surprising that she seemed to understand something of what the sore-hearted young girl felt.
“The really great people of this world—the worth-while people—have almost all been known by one name. There were many Cæsars, but only one Cæsar, who crossed the Rubicon, and in his ‘Commentaries’ said: ‘All Gaul is divided into three parts.’ One never hears what Cleopatra’s other name was,” pursued Miss Trigg, with her queer smile. “Whether Isabella of Spain—the Isabella that made the voyages of Columbus possible—had another name, or not, we do not inquire. How many of us stop to think that the married name of the English Victoria—that great and good queen—was ‘Victoria Wettin,’ and that for the years of her widowhood she was in fact ‘the Widow Wettin’?
“The greatest king-maker the world ever saw—the man who turned all Europe topsy-turvy—was known only by one initial—and that your own, Nancy. Here! I will make you a more striking monogram than any of the other girls possess,” and quickly, with a few skilful strokes of her pencil, Miss Trigg drew a single “N” surrounded by a neat, though inverted, laurel wreath.
“Now your monogram will not conflict with Napoleon’s,” she said, with one of her rare laughs; “but it is quite distinctive. It stands for ‘Nancy.’ Forget that ‘Miss Nobody from Nowhere’ chatter. You may be quite as important as any girl in the school—only you don’t know it now.”
That was what really troubled Nancy Nelson. She was too cheerful and hopeful to really care because she couldn’t entwine the two initials of the only name she knew into an artistic bowknot! It was because “N. N.” really meant nothing.
For Nancy didn’t know whether the name belonged to her or not. She knew absolutely nothing about her identity—who she was, who her people had been—of course, it was safe to say she was an orphan—where she had lived before she came to the Higbee Endowed School when she was a little tot, who paid her tuition here, or what was to become of her when she was graduated.
And Nancy Nelson, now approaching the end of her last year at the school, was more and more persuaded that she should know something about herself—something more than Miss Prentice, or Miss Trigg could tell her.
Years before Nancy had listened to the story of her earlier life as it was whispered into her ear when she and Miss Trigg were alone together, just as though it was a story about some other little girl.
One September day, just after the fall term had opened, a gentleman brought a tiny, rosy-cheeked, much beruffled little girl to Miss Prentice and asked the principal of Higbee School to take charge of the little one for a term of years—to bring her up, in fact, as far as she could be brought up and taught at that institution.
This gentleman—who was a lawyer rather well known at that time in Malden, the small city in which the school was situated—could only say that the little girl’s name was Nancy Nelson, that she had no parents nor other near relatives, and that he could assure the principal that the tuition and other bills would be paid regularly and that Nancy would have a small fund of spending money as she grew.