And so she told Wayne that she had no plans. Perhaps she would go back to Europe with Ann.

He turned quickly at that. "She goes back?"

"Oh yes--I suppose so."

"But why? Where? To whom?"

"Why? Why, why not? Why does one go anywhere? Florence is to Ann what Washington is to me--a sort of center."

"Katie," he asked abruptly, "has she no people? No ties? Isn't she--moored any place?"

"Am I 'moored' any place?" returned Kate.

"Why, yes; to the things that have made you--to the things you're part of. By moored I don't mean necessarily a fixed spot. But I have a feeling--"

He seemed either unable or unwilling to express it, and instead laughed: "I'd like to know how much her father made a month, and whether her mother was a good cook--a few little things like that to make her less a shadow. Do you really get _at_ her, Katie?"

"Why--why, yes," stammered Katie; "though I told you, Wayne, that Ann was different. Quiet--and just now, sad."

"I don't think of her as particularly quiet," he replied; "and sad isn't it, either. I think of her"--he paused and concluded uncertainly--"as a girl in a dream."

"Her dream or your dream, Wayne?" laughed Katie, just to turn it.

She was throwing sticks for the puppies and missed his startled look.

But it was Katie who was startled when he said, still uncertainly, and more to himself than to Katie: "Though she's so real."

Ann and Captain Prescott were coming toward them. She had never looked less like a girl in a dream. Laughing and jesting with her companion, she looked simply like an exceedingly pretty girl having a very good time.

"But you like Ann, don't you, Wayne?" Katie asked anxiously.

"Yes," said Wayne, "I like her."

She came running up the steps to them, flushed, happy, as free from self-consciousness as Worth would have been. "Katie," she cried, "I played the last one in four. Didn't I?" turning proudly to the Captain for endorsement.

Both men were looking at her with pleasure: cheeks flushed, eyes glowing, hair a little disheveled and a little damp about the forehead, panting a little, her lithe, beautiful body swaying gently, hands outstretched to show Wayne how she had hardened her palms, Ann had never seemed so lovely and so live. In that moment it mattered not whether one knew anything about the earning capacity of her father or the culinary abilities of her mother. _She_ was real. Real as sunshine and breezes and birds are real, as Worth and the puppies tumbling over each other on the grass were real, as all that is life-loving is real. And not detached, not mistily floating, but moored to that very love of life, capacity for life, to that look she had awakened in the faces of the men to whom she was talking. It seemed a paltry thing just then to wonder whether Ann was child of farmer, or clothing merchant, or great artist.

She was Life's child. Love's child. Love's child--only she had not dwelt all her days in her father's house. But it was her father's house; that was why, once warmed and comforted, she could radiantly take her place. Watching her as she was going over her game for Wayne, demonstrating some of her strokes, and her slim, beautiful body made even the poor strokes wonderful things, Katie was not speculating on whether Ann had come from Chicago, or Florence, or Big Creek. She was thinking that Ann was product, expression, of the love of the world, that love which had brought the laughter and the tears, brought the hope and the radiance and the tragedy of life.

And then, suddenly and inexplicably, Katie was afraid. Of just what, she did not know; of things--big, tempestuous things--which Katie did not very well understand, and which Ann--perhaps not understanding either--seemed to embody. "Come, Ann," she said, "we must make ready for dinner."

Captain Prescott called after them that next he was going to teach Ann to ride. "Oh, we'll make an army girl of her yet," he laughed.

Ann turned back. "Do you know," she said, "I don't understand the army very well. Just what is it the army does?"

They laughed. "Ask the peace society in Boston," suggested Prescott.

But Wayne said: "Some day soon you and I'll take a ride on the river and I'll deliver a little lecture on the army."

"Oh, that will be nice," said Ann radiantly.

CHAPTER XIV

It was astonishing how Ann seemed to find herself in just that thing of being able to learn to play golf.

They were gay at dinner that night, and Ann was as gay as any one. She continued to talk about her game, which they jestingly permitted her to do, and the men told some good golf stories which she entered into merrily. It was Katie who was rather quiet. While they still lingered around the table Fred Wayneworth joined them, and Katie, eager to talk with him of his people and his work, left Ann alone with Wayne and Captain Prescott, something which up to that time she had been reluctant to do. But to-night she did not feel Ann clinging to her, calling out to her, as she had felt her before. She seemed on surer ground; it was as if golf had given her a passport. From her place in the garden with her cousin, Ann's laugh came down to them from time to time--just a girl's happy laugh.

"Who is your stunning friend, Katie?" Fred asked. "No, stunning doesn't fit her, but lovely. She is lovely, isn't she?"

"Ann's very pretty," said Kate shortly.

"Oh--pretty," he laughed, "that won't do at all. So many girls are pretty, and I never saw any girl just like her."

Again she was vaguely uneasy, and the uneasiness irritated her, and then she was ashamed of the irritation. Didn't she want poor Ann to have a good time--and feel at home--and be admired? Did she care for her when she was somber and shy, and resent her when happy and confident? She told herself she was glad to hear Ann laughing; and yet each time the happy little laugh stirred that elusive foreboding in the not usually apprehensive soul of Katie Jones.

"I want to tell you about my girl, Katie," her cousin was saying. "I've got the _only_ girl."

He was off into the story of Helen: Helen, who was a clerk in the forest service and "put it all over" any girl he had ever known before, who was worth the whole bunch of girls he had known in the East--girls who had been brought up like doll-babies and had doll-baby brains. Didn't Katie agree that a girl who could make her own way distanced the girls who could do nothing but spend their fathers' money?

In her heart, Katie did; had she been defending Fred to his father, the Bishop, or to his Bostonian mother, she would have grown eloquent for Helen. But listening to Fred, it seemed something was being attacked, and she, unreasonably enough, instead of throwing herself with the aggressor was in the stormed citadel with her aunt and uncle and the girls with the doll-baby brains.

And she had been within the citadel that afternoon when Wayne was attacking the army. She gloried in attacks of her own, but let some one else begin one and she found herself running for cover--and to defense.

She wondered if that were anything more meaningful than just natural perversity.

The Bishop had wanted his son for the church; but Fred not taking amicably to the cloth, he had urged the navy. Fred had settled that by failing to pass the examinations for Annapolis. Failing purposely, his father stormily held; a theory supported by the good work he did subsequently at Yale. There he became interested in forestry, again to the disapproval of his parents, who looked upon forestry as an upstart institution, not hallowed by the mellowing traditions of church or navy.

Now they would hold that Helen proved it.

And Helen did prove something. Certain it was that from neither church nor navy would Fred have seen his Helen in just this way.

Perhaps it was that democracy Wayne had been talking about. Perhaps this democracy was a thing not contented with any one section of a man's life. Perhaps once it _had_ him--it had its way with him. Katie thought of the last thirty days--of paths leading out from other paths.

Once one started--

Fred's father had never started. Bishop Wayneworth was only democratic when delivering addresses on the signers of the Declaration of Independence. The democracy of the past was sanctified; the democracy of the present, pernicious and uncouth. Thought of her uncle put Katie on the outside, eyes dancing with the fun of the attack.

"Who are her people, Fred?"

"Oh, Western people--ranchers; best sort of people. They raised the best crop of potatoes in the valley this year."

Katie yearned to commend the family of her daughter-in-law to her Aunt Elizabeth with the boast that they raised the best crop of potatoes in the valley!

"They had hard sledding for a long time; but they're making a go of it now. They've worked--let me tell you. Helen wouldn't have to work now--but don't you say that to Helen! What do you think, Katie? She even wants to keep on working after we're married!"

That planted Katie firmly within. "Oh, she can't do that, Fred."

"Well, I wish you'd tell her she can't. That's where we are now. We stick on that point. I try to assert my manly authority, but manly authority doesn't faze Helen much. She has some kind of theory about the economic independence of woman. You know anything about it, Katie?"