fond of her--to _need_
her!

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 wa