Jane looked a little smiling and a little wistful. "I'll tell you what it is, Auntie," she said; "when my father died he left a debt that ought to be paid, and I promised him I'd pay it. I couldn't marry--it wouldn't be honest." Susan's eyes flew pitifully open. "Good heavens, mercy on us, no; then you never can't marry, sure and certain. There never was the man yet so good he wouldn't throw a thing like that in a woman's teeth. It's a man's way, my dear, and a wife ought not to mind, but one of the difficulties of being a wife is that you always do mind." "I know that I should mind," said Jane quietly, "and, anyway, I don't want to marry. I'm much happier going about on my sunbeam mission, trying to help others a bit here and a bit there." She smiled bravely as she spoke, for all that it takes a deal of training in truth not to waver or quaver in such a minute. She had to think steadily along the lines which she had worked so hard to build into every brain-cell and spirit-fiber of her make-up. "Auntie," she went on then, after a brief reflection that he who works in truth's wool works without fear as to the breaking of one single thread, "you and I are trying dreadfully hard--trying with all our might to do exactly right. We're trying to break your chains by the only way in which material chains can be broken,--by breaking those of others. We can't go astray. If old Mrs. Croft should stay here till she died, and if I should work till I died at paying the debts of others, she'd stay for some good purpose, and I'd be working in the same way. Be very sure of that." For a second Susan looked cheered--but only for a second. Then, "That's all very well for you and me, who want to be uplifted--at least you want to be, and I think maybe I'll like it after I get a little used to it. But Matilda doesn't know or care anything about planes, and it's Matilda I keep thinking of." There was another pause, and then she added: "And it's Matilda I'll have to live with,--along with old Mrs. Croft. Oh, Jane, I'd be so much happier if you'd marry Mr. Rath and let me come and live with you!" Jane went and put her arms about her. "Auntie, it isn't easy to learn my way of looking at things, because you have to keep at them till they're so firm in you that nothing from outside can ever shake or uproot them. But what I believe is just so firm with me, and I won't give anything up,--not even about Mrs. Croft. We're all right and she's all right and everything's all right, and I don't need to marry any one." Susan winked mournfully. "If there was only some way to meet Matilda on her way home and kind of get that through her head before she saw Mrs. Croft. You see, she always shuts that room up cold winters and keeps cold meat in there. I've had many a good meal out of that room."