And she had grown fond of them—that was her punishment. She had grown fond of Happy House; she wanted to be the real Anne Leavitt and belong to Happy House and its precious traditions, that she had mocked; she wanted to have the right to rejoice, now, in the vindication of that brother who had gone away, years before.
Poor little Nancy, shivering there in the chill and silence of the night, her world, her girl's world, fell away from her. Like one looking in from without, she saw her own life as though it was another's—and what it might hold for her! She saw it stripped of the little superficialities of youth; she saw clearly, with uncanny preciseness, causes and effects, the havoc, too, of her own thoughtlessness and weaknesses.
Something in the vision frightened her, but challenged the best in her, too. One had only one life to live and each wasted day counted so much—each wasted hour cost so dearly! In the striving for the far goal one must not leave undone the little things that lay close at hand, the little, worth-while, sometimes-hard things. She had gone a long way down the wrong road, but she'd turn squarely! Her head went high—she would make a clean breast of it all—to them all; Aunt Sabrina, Aunt Milly—Peter Hyde.
Her face went down against her arms; she wanted to hide, even in the darkness, the flush that mantled her cheeks. She could see his eyes as they had seemed to caress her—out there in the orchard. Oh, why had she not told him the truth, then and there; if she had he would have despised her, but it would have killed forever the hope she had read in his face.
Nancy, girlishly eager to struggle in life's tide, now, facing the greatest thing in life, shrank back, afraid. She wanted, oh so much, to be little again; there had always been someone, then, to whom to turn when problems pressed—Daddy, even Mrs. Finnegan—the Seniors in college, the Dean herself. Now—she felt alone.
Lighting her lamp, she pulled a chair to the table and spread out sheets of paper. She wanted to tell it all, while her courage lasted. She wrote furiously, her lips pressed in a straight line. She would not spare herself one bit—Peter Hyde must know just what she had done.
But, at the end, she yielded to a longing too strong to resist.
"Please, please don't think too badly of me. You see you don't know Anne and how her heart was set on going to Russia, and she was sure that if she told her relatives about going they'd stop her. And that seemed, then, the only important thing—neither of us thought of the wrong we'd be doing the people—here. It seemed, too, a very little thing for me to do for her. But I just can't bear to have you hate me!" For a moment she held her pencil over the last words, then hastily sealed the letter and addressed it.
The last paragraph stayed in her mind. "How silly we were, Anne," she said aloud, mentally arraigning those two very young creatures of college days.
Her confession made, a load rolled from Nancy's heart. "Anyway, he'll know the truth," was her soothing thought as she crawled into bed. In the morning she would tell Aunt Sabrina.