"It is something a long way from horrible, I assure you," she replied with dignity. "Ann will be down for dinner to-night, Wayne."

He leaned back and devoted himself to his cigarette with maddening deliberation. Then he smiled. "Through sleeping?"

"Wayne--I'm in earnest. Please don't get yourself into a hateful mood!"

He laughed in real amusement at sight of Katie's puckered face. "I am conscious that feminine wiles are being exercised upon me. I wonder--why?"

"Because I am so anxious you should like Ann, Wayne, and--be nice to her."

"Why?" Again it was that probing, provoking why.

"Because of what she means to me, I suppose."

Something in her voice made him look at her differently. "And what does she mean to you, Katie?"

"Ann is different from all the other girls I've known. She means--something different."

"Strange I've never heard you speak of her."

"I think you have, and have forgotten. Though possibly not--just because of the way I feel about her." She paused, seeking to express how she felt about her. Unable to do so, she concluded simply: "I have a very tender feeling for Ann."

"I see you have," he replied quietly. He looked at her meditatively, and then asked, humorously but gently: "Well Katie, what were you expecting me to do? Order her out of the house?"

"But I want you to be more than civil, Wayne; I want you to be sympathetic."

"I'll be civil and you can bring Prescott on for the sympathetic," he laughed. "You know I haven't great founts of sympathy gushing up in my heart for the _jeune fille_."

"Ann's not the _jeune fille_, Wayne. She's something far more interesting and worth while than that." She paused, again trying to get it, but could do no better than: "I sometimes think of Ann as sitting a little apart, listening to beautiful music."

He smiled. "I can only reply to that, Katie, that I trust she is more inviting than your pictures of her. A young woman who looked as though sitting apart listening to beautiful music should certainly be left sitting apart."

"I'll bring her down," laughed Kate, rising; "then you can get your own picture."

"I'll be decent, Katie," he called after her in laughing but reassuring voice.

The meeting had been accomplished. Dinner had reached the salad, and all was well. Yes, and a little more than well.

From the moment she stood in the doorway of Ann's room and the girl rose at her suggestion of dinner, Katie's courage had gone up. Ann's whole bearing told that she was on her mettle. And what Katie found most reassuring was less the results of the effort Ann was making than her unmistakable sense of the necessity for making it. There was hope in that.

Not that she suggested anything so hopeless as effort. She suggested reserve feeling, and she was so beautiful--so rare--that the suggestion was of feeling more beautiful and rare than a determination to live up to the way she was gowned. Her timidity was of a quality which seemed related to things of the spirit rather than to social embarrassment. Jubilantly Kate saw that Ann meant to "put it over,"

and her depth of feeling on the subject suggested a depth which in itself dismissed the subject.

She saw at a glance that Wayne related Ann to the things her appearance suggested rather than to the suggestions causing that appearance. As Katie said, "Ann, I am so glad that at last my brother is to know you,"

she was thinking that it seemed a friend to whom one might indeed be proud to present one's brother. She never lost the picture of the Ann whom Wayne advanced to meet. She loved her in that rose pink muslin, the skirt cascaded in old-fashioned way, an old-fashioned looking surplice about the shoulders, and on her long slim throat a lovely Florentine cameo swinging on the thinnest of old silver chains. She might have been a cameo herself.

And she never forgot the way Ann said her first words to Wayne. They were two most commonplace words, merely the "Thank you" with which she responded to his hospitable greeting, but that "Thank you" seemed let out of a whole under sea of feeling for which it would try to speak.

Before Wayne could carry out his unmistakable intention of saying more, Katie was airily off into a story about the cook, dragging it in with a thin hook about the late dinner, and the cook in the present case suggested a former cook in Washington whom Katie held, and sought to prove, nature had ordained for a great humorist. The ever faithful subject of cooks served stanchly until they had reached the safety of soup.

Katie was in story-telling mood. She seemed to have an inexhaustible fund of them in reserve which she could deftly strap on as life-preserver at the first far sign of danger. And she would flash into her stories an "As you said, Ann," or "As you would put it, Ann," whenever she found anything to fit the Ann she would create.

Several times, however, the rescuing party had to knock down good form and trample gentle breeding under foot to reach the spot in time. Wayne spoke of a friend in Vienna from whom he had heard that day and turned to Ann with an interrogation about the Viennese. Katie, contemplating the suppleness of Ann's neck, momentarily asleep at her post, missed the "Come over and help us" look, and Ann had begun upon a fatal, "I have never been in--" when Katie, with ringing laugh broke in: "Isn't it odd, Ann, that you should never have been in Vienna, when you lived all those years right there in Florence? I _do_ think it the oddest thing!"

Ann agreed that it _was_ odd--Wayne concurring.

But driven from Vienna, he sought Florence. "And Italy? I presume I go on record as the worst sort of bounder in asking if you really care greatly about living there?"

Katie thought it time Ann try a stroke for herself. One would never develop strength on a life-preserver.

Seeing that she had it to make, she paused before it an instant. Fear seemed to be feeling, and a possible sense of the absurdity of her situation made for a slightly tremulous dignity as she said: "I do love it. Love it so much it is hard to tell just how much--or why." And then it was as if she shrank back, having uncovered too much. She looked as though she might be dreaming of the Court of the Uffizi, or Santa Maria Novella, but Katie surmised that that dreamy look was not failing to find out what Wayne was going to do with his lettuce. But one who suggested dreams of Tuscany when taking observations on the use of the salad fork--was there not hope unbounded for such a one?

Wayne was silent for the moment, as though getting the fact that the love of Italy, or perhaps its associations, was to this girl not a thing to be compressed within the thin vein of dinner talk. "Well," he laughed understanding, "to be sure I don't know it from the inside. I never was of it; I merely looked at it. And I thought the plumbing was abominable."

"Wayne," scoffed Kate, "plumbing indeed! Have you no soul?"

"Yes, I have; and bad plumbing is bad for it."

Ann laughed quite blithely at that, and as though finding confidence in the sound of her own laugh, she boldly volunteered a stroke. "I don't know much about plumbing," Katie heard Ann saying. "I suppose perhaps it is bad. But do you care much about plumbing when looking at"--her pause before it might have been one of reverence--"The Madonna of the Chair?"

Katie treated herself to a particularly tender bit of lettuce and secretly hugged herself, Ann, and "Days in Florence." The Madonna of the Chair furnished the frontispiece for that valuable work.

Ann had receded, flushed, her lip trembling a little; Wayne was looking at her thoughtfully--and a little as one might look at the Madonna of the Chair. Katie heard the trump of duty call her to another story.

CHAPTER X

Feeling that first efforts, even on life-preservers, should not be long ones, it was soon after they returned to the library that Katie threw out: "Well, Ann, if that letter must be written--"

Ann rose. "Yes, and it must."

"But morning is the time for letter writing," urged Wayne.

"Morning in this instance is the time for shopping," said Kate.

She had left Ann at the foot of the stairs, murmuring something about having to see Nora. It was a half hour later that she looked in upon her.

What she saw was too much for Katie. Had the whole of creation been wrecked by her laughing, Katie must needs have laughed just then.

For Ann's two hands gripped "Days in Florence" with fierce resolution.

Ann's head was bent over the book in a sort of stern frenzy. Ann, not even having waited to disrobe, was attacking Florence as the good old city had never been attacked before.

She seemed to get the significance of Katie's laugh, however, for it was as to a confederate she whispered: "I'll get caught!"

"Trust me," said Kate, and laughed from a new angle.