“That’s why I like Walter,” declared Nan, to herself. “I guess that is why I like Cousin Tom—and even Rafe. It’s sometimes ugly to speak the brutal truth, I know. But it is never dishonorable. Now am I deliberately acting deceitfully because I did not tell Mrs. Cupp all my reason for coming down here?”
Such abstract questions as this often troubled Nan Sherwood. She never discussed them with her chum, or with anybody else, now. But she often wished she could talk them over with her mother, as she used to do. “Momsey” always saw everything so clearly, and always knew just the right and wrong of things.
“And it’s so hard sometimes,” Nan murmured, “to tell what is right and what is wrong!”
She snapped on the electric light nearest to her trunk. The receptacles were in rows, each with a card on which the owner’s name was clearly written. Nan’s was in a corner at the end of the main building nearest the unfinished part. She had come down a passage from the stairway to get to the trunk-room. This part of the cellar was a long way from the kitchen and scullery.
Some of the girls were afraid to come to the trunk-room alone, although their imagination had not yet peopled this part of the Hall with ghosts. Nan thought of nothing, when she had raised the lid of her trunk, but one thing. She carefully put aside the empty trays and the layers of clothing hiding the long box at the bottom of the trunk.
It was locked with a little brass padlock. Tom Sherwood had made the box very neatly and nobody could possibly open the receptacle without the key, unless the box were broken. Nan wore the tiny key in a little leather bag, on a chain of fine gold links which had been her mother’s when she was a little girl in Memphis.
Nan quickly unlocked the box and raised the cover. A rush of sweet smelling herb-odors burst forth. It was the combined odor of the tamarack swamp of upper Michigan (or so it seemed), where Nan had spent the past summer. She lifted aside the covering of tissue paper, and revealed a great, pink-cheeked, blue-eyed, beautiful doll!
It was as large as a real baby, and it was dressed elegantly. Nan’s mother, with her own frail hands, had made all the garments “Beautiful Beulah” wore.
“Beulah, dear!” murmured Nan, hugging the doll up tight to her bosom and rocking herself to and fro as she sat upon the floor. “It’s just like going home again, to see you. Wouldn’t you like to see our dear little room in the ‘dwelling in amity’? If only we could fly back there, really! Only for just an hour! And have Momsey and Papa Sherwood at home, too, and all be together again!”
Nan choked up at this and the tears began to flow. But she crowded them back in a moment. “Oh! this will never do—this will never do,” she cried, under her breath. “I’ll only make you feel bad, too, my dear, darling Beautiful Beulah. And, goodness me!” added Nan Sherwood, suddenly becoming practical, “what would Dr. Beulah think if she heard me? She would perhaps think I had named you after her. I’m not sure that a principal of a great school like this would want to be godmother to a doll.