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“Why, girlie,” she answered, “you have much more than ten dollars coming from me. I have never paid you because the doctor told me you would ask for it if you needed it. I will give it to you and then you can go and pay your ten dollars. I wouldn’t have you go home for anything.”

Clasping her precious money in her hand, she flew up the stairs. Here was a letter from her brother also. What a happy day! Eagerly she opened it and read,

“Mother is counting on your coming home for we need your help badly. The cow has died and we are without milk till we can get another. Mother thinks she must spare you at home and let you work out to earn money.”

Oh! Oh! She was needed! She must take the money she had earned to help to buy a cow and again she must forget school. So she went again to her mistress, told her story and began to prepare for the long walk. She went to the school, borrowed the books, and promised them she would surely come again. Then she went again to the old doctor who had been so kind to her.

He listened thoughtfully as she told him of her new plans which still had not changed her vision of being a teacher.

“I will come back, even though it be after four or five years. I will come,” she said, and she rose to go.

Then the doctor turned to his desk and took from it the picture of a girl.

“That was my little girl,” he said. “She, too, wanted to be a teacher and she was in this very school when sickness and death came. When you came to me that first morning and said, ‘I just must be a teacher,’ I could hear her say to me, ‘Help her.’ So I did what you asked me to do–got you a place to work for nothing though I knew you were to be paid. I have watched you work, I have watched you suffer because of the red dress; I have watched you try to do your duty at the sacrifice of yourself. And now that you have done all that you can, I am ready to do the rest. Send the money that you have earned to your mother to help to buy the cow. Come to live here and be my office girl. The money that you earn can go to your mother for I will do for you what I would have done for her and I will do it for her sake and because you have shown me that you are worth while. You shall be a teacher.”

So Janie lived in the home of her new friend. There was help on her lessons, the old red dress went back to the little home in the hills to be worn by some one whom it would fit and in her new, pretty things she could see more plainly–Janie, the teacher.