So the amazing thing came to pass—the odious Miss Nash sat that evening at the camp table, and worked swiftly to make real the Christmas plans. So silent and so white she was that even Serena forbore to sniff at her.
And a yet more amazing thing came to pass. The next morning, when Doctor Peavey had prepared a hot early breakfast for Miss Nash, and had set her part way on her road to the schoolhouse, she returned to camp to find Justine—the old Justine of Nobsco summers—waiting to confide in her.
“She isn’t horrid at all!” Justine broke out. “It’s Ellen Nash, I mean. After you sent us upstairs last night and said that we must rest—did you do it on purpose, Doctor Sarah?—she talked to me. She said she hadn’t talked in months. It was the picture, you know, there on my bureau. She asked if it was my mother, and I—I told her how she died a year ago. And then she told me. Doctor Sarah, there are just she and her mother—and her mother is at the sanitarium with tuberculosis. What chance she has to get well is spoiled by her fretting to have her daughter near her, and they have so little money that that is out of the question. So Ellen Nash has been trying to earn a little by teaching. On Wednesday she got notice from the committee that she wouldn’t be reëngaged for next term. And the same day she had a letter from her mother—a pitiful letter! That Christmas was coming, and they couldn’t be together—that they would never be together! And she says she guesses she was half-crazy, but that morning, when little Emmy Tracy asked her if Santa Claus would come this Christmas, she answered right out of her heart that there wasn’t any Santa Claus, and that all the talk about love and Christmas fellowship was just a story. O poor thing! I can understand! Why, Doctor Sarah, she only went one little inch farther than I had gone, and she is so much worse off than I. For my blessed mother never suffered any, and we were together up to the very last hour. Doctor Sarah!”
“Yes, Justine?”
“I—I haven’t been doing this year as mother would have expected me to do.”
“That’s all over now,” said Doctor Peavey, heartily. She hardly knew how truly she had spoken, but she knew an hour later, when Justine again was at her side.
“Doctor Sarah,” she said, with her old energy, “can we go home to-night, on the night train?”
“What of our tree at Hardscrabble?”
“Of course we won’t disappoint the children. We’ll write a letter, in the name of Santa Claus, and ask them to Serena Wetherbee’s on Christmas day. She says she’d be glad to have them. You wouldn’t think, to look at her dear old granite face, that she loved children so. And Ellen Nash will have the tree and the presents all ready. O Doctor Sarah, it would have made you cry to hear how she went out to get a tree, and had even taken some of her hard-earned money to buy nuts and apples for the children, because she wanted to make up for what she had said! But now they’ll have a sure-enough Christmas at Hardscrabble, and we’ll go home. There’s so much I must do, and only a day to do it in! So many children that mother wouldn’t want to have go unremembered! And you, Doctor Sarah, you’re willing to go home?”
“Yes,” said Doctor Peavey.