“Nothing, nothing. I thought it rather a curious occupation.”
“We don’t know him very well,” she continued, scarcely noticing my last remark. “He went away to school in the city long before Moonbeam was born, and she is older than I even. He used always to make the beds at home before he went, and when he went they missed him so much that his mother wrote to tell him she hadn’t slept for two nights, everything seemed so strange, and not near so comfortable. Well, when he got that letter he was sitting at breakfast with the rest, and suddenly he just put his head down on the table and cried.”
“But why?”
“Well, don’t you see, it had been his secret. When he had the time to himself at night he’d been thinking and thinking about it all, and he’d tried one thing and then he’d tried another.”
“Do you mean he had concentrated all his energies on bed-making?”
“Yes, and he never knew it had had the least effect, because no one had ever said a word to him.”
“Not even his mother?”
Sunbeam laughed.
“Oh, no. Why should she? She pretended she knew nothing about it till he had gone. Well, when they all saw him crying they thought he was putting it on, as he was given to a great many antics, but the master, who was sitting at the top of the table, was cleverer than the boys, and when the meal was over he sent for him and he asked him why he cried. Then he showed him the letter, and he read it through, and then he said to him, ‘You may make my bed as well as your own if you care to.’
“For he knew it is the best to do things for others. It is how we reach perfection, when we have learnt by simplicity to trust ourselves. And that was just what he had been longing for, yet had never liked to ask, for he had never had anything else to make but his own bed since coming from home.”