“Please,” she murmured gently, persuasively, as the sobs grew wilder.

Suddenly the girl raised her head and turned upon Katie passionately.  “What do you mean?  What is this all about?  I know well enough that people are not like this!  This is not the way the world is!”

“Not like what?” Kate asked quietly.

“Doing things for people they don’t have to do things for!  Taking people into their houses and giving them things—­their best things!—­treating them as if there was some reason for treating them like that!  I never heard of such a thing.  What are you doing it for?”

Katie sat there smiling at her calmly.  “Do you want to know the honest truth?”

The girl nodded, looking at her with anticipatory defiance, but that defiance which could so easily crumble to despair.

“Very well then,” she began lightly, “here goes.  I don’t know that it will sound very well, but it has the doubtful virtue of being true.  The first reason is that it interests me; perhaps I should even say—­amuses me.  I always did like new things—­queer things—­surprises—­things different.  And the other reason is that I’ve taken a sure enough liking to you.”

She had drawn back at the first reason; but the bluntness of the first must have conveyed a sense of honesty in the second, for like the child who has been told something nice, a smile was faintly suggested beneath the tears.

“Would you like to hear my favorite quotation from Scripture?” Kate wanted to know.

At thought of Katie’s having a favorite quotation the smile grew a little more defined.

“My favorite quotation is this:  ‘Take no thought for the morrow.’  Perhaps it ends in a way that spoils it; I would never read the rest of it, fearing it would ruin itself, but taking just so much and no more—­and it certainly is your privilege to do that if you wish—­if all of a thing is good for you, part of it must be somewhat good—­it does make the most comfortable philosophy of life I know of.  It’s a great solace to me.  Now when I am seventy, I don’t doubt I will have lost my teeth.  Losing one’s teeth is such a distressing thing that I could sit here and weep bitterly for mine were it not for the sustaining power of my favorite quotation.  Why don’t you adopt it for your favorite, too?  And, taking no thought for the morrow, is there any reason in the world why you shouldn’t go out now and have a beautiful drive?  Going for a drive doesn’t commit one to any philosophy of life, or line of action, does it?  And whatever you do, don’t ever refuse nice things because you can’t see the reason for people’s doing them.  I shudder to think how much—­or better, how little fun I would have had in life had I first been compelled to satisfy myself I was entitled to it.  We’re entitled to nothing—­most of us; that’s all the more reason for taking all we can get.  But come now!  Here are some fresh things—­yours seem a bit dusty.”