Nan sat down on the unopened trunk when her aunt had left her. She dabbed her eyes with her handkerchief. Home certainly was never like this! She did not see how she was ever going to be able to stand it.
“If Momsey or Papa Sherwood knew about this they'd be awfully sorry for me,” thought Nan, still sitting on the trunk. “Such a looking place! Nothing to see but snow and trees,” for the village of Pine Camp was quite surrounded by the forest and all the visitor could see from the windows of her first-floor bedroom were stumps and trees, with deep snow everywhere.
There was a glowing wood stove in the room and a big, chintz-covered box beside it, full of “chunks.” It was warm in the room, the atmosphere being permeated with the sweet tang of wood smoke.
Nan dried her eyes. There really was not any use in crying. Momsey and Papa Sherwood could not know how bad she felt, and she really was not selfish enough to wish them to know.
“Now, Nanny Sherwood!” she scolded herself, “there's not a particle of use of your sniveling. It won't 'get you anywhere,' as Mrs. Joyce says. You'll only make your eyes red, and the folks will see that you're not happy here, and they will be hurt.
“Mustn't make other folks feel bad just because I feel bad myself,” Nan decided. “Come on! Pluck up your courage!
“I know what I'll do,” she added, literally shaking herself as she jumped off the trunk. “I'll unpack. I'll cover up everything ugly that I can with something pretty from Tillbury.”
Hurried as she had been her departure from the cottage on Amity Street, Nan had packed in her trunk many of those little possessions, dear to her childish heart, that had graced her bedroom. These appeared from the trunk even before she hung away her clothes in the unplastered closet where the cold wind searched through the cracks from out-of-doors. Into that closet, away back in the corner, went a long pasteboard box, tied carefully with strong cord. Nan patted it gently with her hand before she left the box, whispering:
“You dear! I wouldn't have left you behind for anything! I won't let them know you are here; but sometimes, when I'm sure nobody will interrupt, you shall come out.”
She spread a fringed towel over the barren top of the dresser. It would not cover it all, of course; but it made an island in a sea of emptiness.