"Life's lovely when you think of it rightly, isn't it?" Madeleine said thoughtfully. "I'm so pleased over having come here. You see Father and Mother wanted me to spend a few weeks quietly where I could rest and pick myself up a little, and so they sent me here. I didn't care much about coming, but I'm glad now. You're doing me lots of good, Jane; you seem to help me to unlock the doors to everything that's just best in me." "It isn't that I do it," said Jane; "it's that it's been done to me, and after it got through me, it's bound to shine on. It's like light; every window you clean lets it through into another place, where maybe there's something else to clean and let it through again." "I suppose we just live to keep clean and let light through," laughed Madeleine, cutting out the biscuits. "That's all." "I think that you'd make a good preacher, Jane; you've such nice, plain, homely, understandable ways of putting things." Jane laughed and popped the pan into the oven. "Come and help lay the table," she said. "Oh, you never saw anything as sweet as Aunt Susan's joy in her own things. She's like a little child at Christmas. It's a kind of coming back to life for her." "They say that her sister was awfully mean to her." "But she wasn't at all. She thought that she was sicker than she was, and she kept her in bed, and the joke of it was that Aunt Susan didn't like to hurt her feelings by letting her see what mistaken ideas she had, so she hopped up every time the coast was clear and kept lively and interested trying to be about and in bed at once." "How perfectly delightful! I never heard anything so funny. And then you came and discovered the truth." "Well, I didn't want her to stay in bed. I'd never encourage any one in a false belief, but she hadn't the belief,--she had only the false appearance. She didn't enjoy being an invalid one bit." "I think it's too droll," said Madeleine. "Didn't you laugh when it dawned on you first?" "It dawned on me rather sadly. But we laugh together now." "What will she do when her sister comes back?" "Oh, that will all come out nicely. I don't know just how, but I know that it will come out all right." "Do you always have faith in things coming out rightly?" "Always. I wouldn't dare not to. I'm one of those people who kind of feel the future as it draws near, and so I wouldn't allow myself to feel any mean future drawing near, on principle. I always feel that nice things are marching straight towards me as fast as ever the band of music plays." "Do you believe that it really makes any difference?" "Of course it makes a difference. It makes all the difference in the world, because hope's a rope by which any good thing can haul you right up to it, hand over hand." "You give me a lot to think about," said Madeleine.