“Oh, mother, not that!” cried Rhoda.  “Not the gold piece that grandfather gave you because he was so proud of your leading the school a whole year both in scholarship and deportment!”

“Yes, he gave it to me on my tenth birthday, just a little while before he died.  It was the last thing he ever gave me, and I have kept it for thirty years as one of my most precious possessions.”  She was rubbing the little coin until it shone like new, with the bit of chamois skin in which it had been folded.  “But dear as it is to me, it is not so dear as the keeping of my word.  Here, Johnny, take it down to the corner, and ask Mr. Dolkins to change it for you.”

Mr. Marshall listened with a pained contraction of the brows.  “Couldn’t you wait until the latter part of next week, Abby?” he asked.  “I think I could get the money for you by that time, and I hate to have you part with the little keepsake you have treasured so long.”

Mrs. Marshall shook her head.  “No, Robert,” she answered, “for that would make Johnny break his word, too.  You know he promised the boys,—­and we couldn’t afford that, could we, son?  We must keep our word at any cost.”  She slipped the money into his hand, kissed him, and bade him hurry home again; and Johnny, rushing back to his impatient creditors, felt that it was something very solemn indeed which had just taken place.

[Illustration:  “’DEAR AS IT IS TO ME, IT IS NOT SO DEAR AS THE KEEPING OF MY WORD.’”]

Johnny’s little room at the head of the stairs was heated by the hall stove, so that the door stood open all day long.  When the new quilt was folded across the foot of his bed, it was the first thing that caught the eye of every one passing up the stairs.

Rob made up a verse about it, which he sang so often to tease Johnny that the first note was enough to make the child bristle up for a fight: 

  “This is the patchwork all forlorn,
  Made by the boys in Marshall’s barn. 
  The dog and the cat and even the rat
  Had a hand in that—­
  A hand in the Quilt that Jack built!”

“You needn’t make fun of it,” said Rhoda one day.  “It has held me to my word more than once.  Yesterday, for instance.  I would have broken my promise to poor little Miss Sara Grimes, to help her entertain her old ladies, and would have accepted Harry Dilling’s invitation, which came later, to go sleighing.  But that quilt would not let me.  It showed me mother as she stood there with her precious little gold piece, saying. ‘We must keep our word at any cost!’ After that I couldn’t disappoint poor old Miss Sara.”

“I know,” answered Rob, softly, looking up from his algebra.  “It’s served me the same way.  It lies there like the exponent of a higher power,—­the exponent of mother’s standards and ideals that she expects us to raise ourselves up to.”