little kid," she said tenderly, "you must have been worried
something awful, but still I don't get you; what was the idea in
sticking around and thinking you _had_ to marry somebody you didn't
like? You coulda gone to some one and claimed pertection. You could uv
appealed to the p'lice if worst came to worst----!"

"Oh! But Jane I couldn't! That would have brought our family into
disgrace, and father would have felt so _dreadfully_ about it if he had
been alive! I couldn't quite bring myself, either, to go against his
dying request. We had always been so much to each other, Daddy and I.
Besides, I didn't mind _Bessemer_ so _much_--he was always kind--though
we never had much to do with each other----"

"Well, I don't think I'd have stopped around long to please a father
that didn't care any more for me than to want me to marry somebody I
felt that way about!" said Jane, indignantly. "I haven't much use for a
father like that!"

"Oh, but he wasn't like that!" said Betty, rising up in her eagerness
and looking at Jane through her shining curls that were falling all
about her eager, troubled young face, "and he did love me, Jane, he
loved me better than anything else in the whole world! That was why I
was willing to sacrifice almost anything to please him."

"Well, I'll be darned!" said Jane Carson, sitting up squarely in bed and
staring at the spot of light on the wall. "That gets my goat! How could
a man love you and yet want to torment you?"

"Well, you see, Jane, he hadn't been very fond of them when they were
boys"--she spoke it with dignity and a little gasp as if she were
committing a breach of loyalty to explain, but realized that it was
necessary--"and he felt when he was dying that he wanted to make
reparation, so he thought if I should marry one of them it would show
them that he had forgiven them----"

"It--may--be--so," drawled Jane slowly, nodding her head deliberately
with each word, "but--I don't see it that _way_! What kind of a man was
this father of yours, anyway?"

"Oh, a wonderful man, Jane!" Betty eagerly hastened to explain. "He was
all the world to me, and he used to come up to school week-ends and take
me on beautiful trips and we had the best times together, and he would
tell me about my own dear mother----"

Betty's hand grasped Jane's convulsively and her voice died out, in a
sudden sob. Jane's hand went quickly to the bright head on the pillow:

"There! there!" she whispered tenderly