What Nan was looking for was not in sight. She stepped inside, and raised the torch. The rotting wood had been neatly scooped out, and where the aperture grew smaller at the top a wide shelf had been made by the ingenious Margaret. Nan had never been in this hide-out before.
“It must be here! It must be here!” she kept telling herself, and stood on her tiptoes to feel along the shelf, which was above her head.
Nan discovered nothing at first. She felt along the entire length of the shelf again. Nothing!
“I know better!” she almost sobbed. “My dear, beautiful.”
She jumped up, feeling back on the shelf with her right hand. Her fingers touched something, and it was not the rotting wood of the tree!
“It's there!” breathed the excited girl. She flashed her lamp around, searching for something to stand upon. There in the corner was a roughly made footstool.
In a moment Nan had the footstool set in position, and had stepped upon it. Her hand darted to the back of the shelf. There was a long box, a pasteboard box.
Nan dropped her lamp with a little scream of ecstasy, and of course the light went out. But she had the long box clasped in her arms. She could not wait to get home with it, but tumbled off the stool and sat down upon it, picked up the torch, held it so the round spot-light gave her illumination, and untied the string.
Off came the cover. She peeped within. The pink and white loveliness of Beulah's wax features peered up at her.
In fifteen minutes Nan was back in her room, without being discovered by anybody, and with the doll safely clasped in her arms. Indeed, she went to bed a second time that night with her beloved playmate lying on the pillow beside her, just as she had done when a little girl.
“I suppose I'm foolish,” she confessed to Aunt Kate the next morning when she told her about it. “But I loved Beulah so much when I was little that I can't forget her now. If I go to Lakeview Hall I'm going to take her with me. I don't care what the other girls say!”
“You are faithful in your likes, child,” said Aunt Kate nodding. “'Tis a good trait. But I'd like to lay that Marg'ret Llewellen across my knee, for her capers.”
“And I didn't think she cared for dolls,” murmured Nan.