Nancy Lee was a sturdy, strong little doll made of wood from head to foot, with eyes of ocean blue and a neat row of yellow curls. Her back was as stiff as a poker, quite different from the floppy rag doll whom Sally now lifted from her bed.
‘Here is Paulina,’ said Sally, trying to straighten the dolly’s drooping head. ‘She is as old as I am, and almost as worn-out looking as your Tilly Maud. But I love her even if she is dirty and old.’
‘They are the best to sleep with,’ said Alice soberly. ‘I have a white bed for my dolls at home. But all my toys are packed away, and I have only Tilly Maud with me here.’
‘This is my stove, and here is my doll-house,’ went on Sally, moving round the room. ‘Father made the house for me out of a big box last winter. And this sofa has a broken leg. It can’t stay downstairs. So sometimes I play it is a ship, and sometimes a train. It is anything I like. Now what shall we play this morning, Alice? You tell first what you want to play.’
‘I would like to play “house,”’ said Alice promptly. ‘I like “house” best of all. Tilly Maud is sick. She ought to go to bed.’
‘So is Paulina,’ returned Sally, well pleased with this idea. ‘See how red her face is! She has measles, I think. And Dora and Nora and Flora ought to go to bed, too. Don’t you think their faces are too red, Alice, to stay up any longer?’
It was quite true that the cheeks of Dora and Nora and Flora were as red as the reddest cherries that ever grew on a tree, and Sally and Alice were of one mind in thinking that these dollies must be very ill indeed.
‘Let us put every one of them to bed together on the sofa,’ suggested Alice.
So all in a row the sick and suffering children were placed on the old sofa and tenderly covered from the chill of the rainy day.
On the end lay Tilly Maud, and next to her came Paulina, both of them long and limp and shabby, with toes that would stick out from under the coverlet no matter how often their nurses patted them down or tucked them snugly in.