Lady Agatha rose to her full height. "You may go to your room, Jane, and stay there for the remainder of the day," she said in an awful voice. "I see that my Christian charity is entirely misplaced in your case. I shall, after all, be obliged to consult your uncle with regard to some other disposal of your person. I cannot bear you about me longer. Your influence on my dear children is _most unfortunate_!" Jane turned sharply--she already had her hand upon the door. "I hope uncle will send me away!" she exclaimed passionately. "I hate this house and everyone in it--except Percy and Susan!" Lady Agatha, shaken out of her usual icy self-control, darted forward. She was a tall, big woman and she swept the girl before her in a blast of cold fury up the stairs--two flights of them--to the little attic room; there she thrust the slight figure within, and locked the door upon it. Jane stood in the middle of the floor and listened to the ugly click of the key and the sound of Lady Agatha's retreating boot heels on the uncarpeted corridor. "Well," said Jane ruefully. "I _have_ made a mess of it!" She had completely forgotten her prayer of the night before. Somebody had laid a fire in her rusty little grate. It was Susan, of course, who was continually going out of her way to be kind to the girl to whom everyone else was so persistently and pointedly unkind. Jane's sore heart warmed toward honest Susan, as she hunted for a match in the ugly little safe on the mantel. "I've a day off, anyway," she told herself, "and I'll cobble up that old gown of Gwen's so that I can wear it." Miss Blythe was well used to cobbling up old gowns and clever at it, too. She waxed increasingly cheerful as she spread the faded breadths across her knee and discovered that the wrong side of the fabric was fresh and bright. Later she congratulated herself upon a stray sheet of _The Times_, left behind by Susan after laying the fire; it would do admirably for pattern material. As she spread its crumpled folds upon her counterpane, preparatory to evolving a wonderful yoke design, her eye fell upon a line in the column of "Female Help Wanted." It read as follows: "A lady about to travel in America wishes to engage intelligent young female as companion. Good wages. Duties nominal. Apply mornings to Mrs. Augustus Markle, 10 Belgravia Crescent." "Oh!" murmured Jane Blythe. She sank down on the edge of her hard little bed and read the fateful lines again. "A lady about to travel in America--an intelligent young female as traveling companion. Why, _I_ am an intelligent young female!" exclaimed Jane, with the air of a discoverer; "I wonder if I look the part?"