CHAPTER XXV NANCY'S CONFESSION A thousand torments seemed to rack poor Nancy's tired soul and body. For a long time she had lain, very still, across her bed. Then she had, mechanically, made ready for the night. But sleep would not come. Wider and wider-eyed she stared at the dim outline that was her open window. After awhile she crossed to it and knelt down before it, her bare arms folded on the sill. A sense of remorse, which Nancy had been trying for some time past to keep tucked back somewhere in a corner of her mind, now overwhelmed her. She saw herself a cheat, an imposter. What would these good people of Happy House say of her when they knew all of them, even Peter Hyde--and little Nonie! Her hands clenched tightly, Nancy faced what she called the reckoning. Only a few days before she and Aunt Milly had had a long talk. Aunt Milly had told her how, one afternoon, she had tried to walk--and had failed. "I'd been praying, my dear, that it might be possible. I thought, perhaps, I felt so much better----. But the wonderful thing was Nancy,--_I didn't care_! My life seems so full, now, of real things, thanks to all you've done for me, that whether I can walk or not is insignificant. And I shall always have you, anyway, Nancy!" Aunt Milly had said with the yearning look in her eyes that Nancy knew so well. What would Aunt Milly say when she knew? How had she, Nancy, betrayed Sabrina's trust? Rapidly, as one can at such moments, Nancy's mind went over the weeks of her stay at Happy House. She had let herself go so far; she had taught these people she was deceiving to grow 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.