It seemed to Nancy as though the little pages of the book, with their age-yellow clippings and curious entries, were opening to her a new side of her father's life. She remembered some stuffed birds in her father's cabinet that she had known in a vague sort of way had come from Africa; it was intensely interesting to read from the little book that "the well-known newspaper man, Eugene Leavitt, and his young son, Eugene, had gone on a six-months' trip to Africa."
"Milly wrote once to our brother, though I never knew it until I found this book. After a long while he answered with this note. B'lindy's put it here," turning a page.
The few lines were strangely characteristic of Nancy's own father. They told the younger sister that he'd found the world a very kind and a very good place to live in.
Another letter had been written by Nancy's father. It told, in a boyish, awkward way, of his father's death and that his father, before his death, had asked him to write to the relatives in Freedom and tell them that "there was no hard feeling."
Nancy pondered over this letter for a moment. A great many questions came into her mind. Her father must have inherited from his father a sense of hurt and injustice, or why, through all the years, and years of poverty, too, had he refrained from any mention of the aunts in Freedom?
Like links in a chain the little entries in B'lindy's book connected the three generations, for the last clipping told how the young wife of Eugene Leavitt, Jr., had been killed in a runaway in Central Park, leaving motherless the little three-year-old daughter, Anne Leavitt.
"Once Milly told me of finding this. Sometimes she used to wonder what you were like. But I was always angry when she mentioned you--I wanted to feel that I had rooted out all affection for my brother and his kin! As the years went by, though, I grew afraid--what was I going to do with this earthly wealth I possessed? Then I wrote that letter to you in college."
As though it had been but the day before Nancy saw again the beloved dormitory room, old Noah and his letter.
Then the whole truth flashed across her mind! Anne's Aunt Sa-something was the dear little Saphonia Leavitt, who lived with her sister Janie on the lonely road out of Freedom!