She started violently, then turned very white. "Don't say that. I've always thought of you as engaged to Madeleine. She was talking to me, and I thought--I--" She stopped, quite shaken. "You misunderstand her. She's always been in love with one fellow--the one that her parents are against. He's even poorer than I am." Then Jane pressed her lips together and interlocked her fingers. "I can never marry. I never think of it. There's money to be paid, nobody to pay it but me, and no way to get it except to earn it." Lorenzo looked almost sternly at her. "What about the book you lent me; it would say that that was setting limits. It says that we've not to concern ourselves with ways and means. I've only to concern myself with loving you. The rest will come along of its own accord." She shook her head. "No, it won't. This world is all learning, and it's part of my lesson not to be able to apply it in absolute faith to myself. So many teachers have wisdom to give away which they can't quite take unto themselves, you know." She smiled a little tremulously. "But you ought to take it unto yourself. It ought to be easy and simple for you to realize that if conditions are false, they don't exist; that if you want a home, it's because you are going to have one; that if I love you, it's because it's right that you should be loved." She put her hands down helplessly on each side of the chair-seat. "I never even think of such things," she said, almost in a whisper. "But why not?" "I've always been so necessary to others. I've no rights in my own life." "But if life is a thing to guide, why not guide your beneficence as well from a basis of home as from one of homelessness?" "Nothing has ever seemed to be for me, myself. Everything has always pointed to me for others." Lorenzo paced back and forth. "But it is the women like you who should show the way out of the wilderness and back to the right, instead of attempting to order the chaos while sweeping on with it. If there be a real truth in this new teaching which lays hold of all those who are in earnest so easily and so quickly, its first care should be to demonstrate happiness in the lives of its believers,--not the negative happiness of wide-spread devotion to others, but the positive lessons of joy in the center from which springs--must spring--the next generation of better, wiser men and women, those among whom I expect to live as an old man." Jane turned her face away, her eyes filled with tears. "You make me feel very small and petty," she said; "you show me a way beyond what I had guessed. But I can't grasp at it; I'm too used to asking nothing for myself. I'm always so sure that God is managing for me. And I have so much to do." "Perhaps realization that God is managing is all that you need to set right. Perhaps that confidence will bring you all things. Even me." He laughed a little.