"But we won't talk about it to people," said fine-minded Jean. "Perhaps she wouldn't like to have everybody know."
Even Jean, however, did not guess what a comfort proud Mrs. Crane had found it to have her warm-hearted little friends stand between her poverty and the sometimes-too-prying eyes of a grown-up world.
Unobservant though they had seemed, the girls did not forget about the Mother-Hubbardlike state of Mrs. Crane's cupboard. After that one of their finest castles in Spain always had Mrs. Crane, who would have made such a delightful mother and who had never had any children, enthroned as its gracious mistress. When they had time to think about it at all, it always grieved them to think of their generous-natured, no-longer-young friend dreading a poverty-stricken, loveless, and perhaps homeless old age; for this, they had discovered, was precisely what Mrs. Crane was doing.
"If she were a little, thin, active old lady, with bobbing white curls like Grandma Pike," said Jean, "lots of people would have a corner for her; but poor Mrs. Crane takes up so much room and is so heavy and slow that she's going to be hard to take care of when she gets old. Oh, why couldn't she have had just one strong, kind son to take care of her?"
"When I'm married," offered Mabel, generously, "I'll take her to live with me. I won't have any husband if he doesn't promise to take Mrs. Crane, too."
"You shan't have her," declared Jean. "I want her myself."
"She's already promised to me," said Bettie, triumphantly. "We're going to keep house together some place, and I'm going to be an old-maid kindergarten teacher."
"I don't think that's fair, Bettie Tucker," said Marjory, earnestly. "I don't see how my children are to have any grandmother if she doesn't live with me. Imagine the poor little things with Aunty Jane for a grandmother!"
