Nurse Sarah said she should never forget the night she came, and how she looked, and how utterly flabbergasted everybody was to see her—­a little slim eighteen-year-old girl with yellow curly hair and the merriest laughing eyes they had ever seen. (Don’t I know?  Don’t I just love Mother’s eyes when they sparkle and twinkle when we’re off together sometimes in the woods?) And Nurse said Mother was so excited the day she came, and went laughing and dancing all over the house, exclaiming over everything. (I can’t imagine that so well.  Mother moves so quietly now, everywhere, and is so tired, ’most all the time.) But she wasn’t tired then, Nurse says—­not a mite.

“But how did Father act?” I demanded.  “Wasn’t he displeased and scandalized and shocked, and everything?”

Nurse shrugged her shoulders and raised her eyebrows—­the way she does when she feels particularly superior.  Then she said: 

“Do?  What does any old fool—­beggin’ your pardon an’ no offense meant, Miss Mary Marie—­but what does any man do what’s got bejuggled with a pretty face, an’ his senses completely took away from him by a chit of a girl?  Well, that’s what he did.  He acted as if he was bewitched.  He followed her around the house like a dog—­when he wasn’t leadin’ her to something new; an’ he never took his eyes off her face except to look at us, as much as to say:  ‘Now ain’t she the adorable creature?’”

“My father did that?” I gasped.  And, really, you know, I just couldn’t believe my ears.  And you wouldn’t, either, if you knew Father.  “Why, I never saw him act like that!”

“No, I guess you didn’t,” laughed Nurse Sarah with a shrug.  “And neither did anybody else—­for long.”

“But how long did it last?” I asked.

“Oh, a month, or maybe six weeks,” shrugged Nurse Sarah.  “Then it came September and college began, and your father had to go back to his teaching.  Things began to change then.”

“Right then, so you could see them?” I wanted to know.

Nurse Sarah shrugged her shoulders again.

“Oh, la! child, what a little question-box you are, an’ no mistake,” she sighed.  But she didn’t look mad—­not like the way she does when I ask why she can take her teeth out and most of her hair off and I can’t; and things like that. (As if I didn’t know!  What does she take me for—­a child?) She didn’t even look displeased—­Nurse Sarah loves to talk. (As if I didn’t know that, too!) She just threw that quick look of hers over her shoulder and settled back contentedly in her chair.  I knew then I should get the whole story.  And I did.  And I’m going to tell it here in her own words, just as well as I can remember it—­bad grammar and all.  So please remember that I am not making all those mistakes.  It’s Nurse Sarah.

I guess, though, that I’d better put it into a new chapter.  This one is yards long already.  How do they tell when to begin and end chapters?  I’m thinking it’s going to be some job, writing this book—­diary, I mean.  But I shall love it, I know.  And this is a real story—­not like those made-up things I’ve always written for the girls at school.