"And we can't send you things, either, for they'd never reach you—some of those awful Bolshevists would be sure to steal them!"
Madame Breshkovsky, the little Grandmother of the Russian Revolution, had made several visits to the University, and Anne, with the others, had listened over and over to her vivid, heartrending stories of the suffering needs of the children of the real Russia. It had been after such an evening that Anne had given herself to the cause. So that, when Nancy and Claire fretted excitedly over the hardships and dangers of the undertaking, she had only looked at them with the question in her grave, dark eyes: "What matters it if perhaps Anne Leavitt does lack a few clothes and food and some silly luxuries if she is doing a little, little bit to help her fellowmen?"
Nancy Leavitt, like the beloved Topsy, had just "growed up." To her chums, in her own spirited way, she had once described how: "Ever since I can remember there were always just Dad and I. When he wanted to go anywhere he used to pick me up like a piece of baggage and off we went. Half the time I didn't go to the same school two years in succession. And he used to teach me, too. Oh, how homesick I was when I came here—without him. We're just like pals!"
Nancy's physical well-being had been watched over by nurses of almost every race and color. She knew a little Hindoo and from the old Hindoo "ayah" she had caught bits of Hindoo mysticism. She had romped and rolled with Japanese babies; she had lived on a ranch in Mexico until bandits had driven them away; she had trudged along behind her father over miles of trail in Alaska. And the only place she had ever called "home" was a tiny flat in New York, where her father kept the pretty furniture that Nancy's mother had bought when a bride. Back to this they would come after long intervals, for a little respite from their wanderings, and for Nancy the homecoming was always an excitingly happy one from the moment she ran down to Mrs. Finnegan's door for the key to the lugging out again of the two little trunks, which meant a sudden departure for some distant land.
College had brought a great change into this gypsy life and a grief at the separation from her "Dad." But as the weeks had passed her letters to him read less and less like a wail of homesickness, and were filled more and more with the college happenings and whole passages devoted to girlish descriptions of her new friends.
For the last two years her father had been overseas as senior newspaper correspondent with the American Expeditionary Force, and it would be weeks before he could return. That thought added now to the lonely ache in Nancy's heart as she stared at her chums and wondered what it would seem like to live day after day without seeing them!
These three had trod together up the Paths of Learning until they were passing now the Gateway of Life; and yet, right at that moment, all of them, even Anne, felt childishly lonely and homesick for the shelter of the University they were leaving.
That was why the chiming of the Library clock, that had marked the passage of happy time for more than one generation of youth, brought a shadow across each of the three young faces.
A little wistfulness crept into Nancy's voice. "Your life's all cut out for you, Anne. It's positively thrilling! Though I'd make an awful mess out of any such undertaking. And Claire has her family. I'll just go to New York and get the key from Mother Finnegan and work like mad on the 'Child.' I want to finish it before Dad comes home. I shall send it, then, to Theodore Hoffman himself—I might as well hitch my wagon to the tiptoppest star—or whatever it is you do! Of course it isn't as grand as going to Russia, but I'm going to work, and some day, maybe, I'll be famous all over the world!"
"Little Anne Leavitt, the great dramatist!" murmured Big Anne fondly.