"As they did to-day," Mary answered, with a shrug. "They'd run home howling and their mother would think I was incapable and give my place to someone else. No, we must have the money, so I'll have to go on and put in my best licks, no matter how I detest it." When she drew on her gloves she was so near to tears that the little bloodstone ring on her hand looked so dim she could scarcely see it. But it made her glance up with a smile into the benevolent old face above her, and she stripped back the glove from her finger with a dramatic gesture. "See?" she said, brightly, exhibiting the ring. "By the bloodstone on my finger, I'll keep my oath until the going down of one more sun." "You're a brave little girl. That's what you are!" said Mrs. Barnaby, stooping to kiss her good-bye. Only that week she had read _The Jester's Sword_, from which Mary was quoting, and she knew what grim determination lay beneath the light tone. "I guess it will help you the same way it did the poor Jester, to remember that it's only one day at a time you're called on to endure. And another thing," she added, trying to put as many consoling thoughts into their parting as possible, "If you _do_ succeed in teaching them anything that'll help to snatch them as brands from the burning, it will count for a star in your crown just as much as if you'd gone out and converted the heathen on 'India's coral strand.'" "It's not stars in my crown I'm working for," laughed Mary. "It's for pence in my purse." Nevertheless the suggestion stayed with her all the way home. When conversation flagged, she filled the silences with pleasant snatches of day-dreams, in which she saw herself becoming to these benighted little creatures, asleep on either side of her, the inspiration that Madam Chartley was to everyone who crossed the threshold of Warwick Hall. "I've just _got_ to do something to make them see themselves as they look to other people," she thought, desperately. "But the question is, _what_?" A hard problem indeed for one who, in many ways, was still only a child herself. CHAPTER X IN JOYCE'S STUDIO IT was a wild, blustery day in March, two months after Mary's interrupted visit at the ranch. Joyce Ware, sitting before the glowing wood fire in the studio, high up on the top floor of a New York apartment house, had never known such a lonesome Sunday. The winds that rattled the casements and sent alternate dashes of rain and snow against the panes had kept her house-bound all day.