There was a pitiful note in her voice that appealed to the mother in Jane, and she stooped over her guest and patted her comfortingly on the shoulder:
"You poor 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: