"You forget that I'm one of the doll-baby girls," she replied in a light voice which trailed a little bitterness on behind.

"Not you! Just before I left I said to Helen: 'Well there's at least one relative of mine who will have sense enough to appreciate you, and that's my corking cousin Katie Jones!'"

That lured feminine Kate outside again. "Fred," she asked, moved by her never slumbering impulse to find out about things, "just what is it you care for in Helen? Is she pretty? Funny? Sympathetic? Clever? What?"

She watched his face as he tried to frame it. And watching, she decided that whatever kind of girl Helen was, she was a girl to be envied. Yes, and to be admired.

"Well I fear it doesn't sound sufficiently romantic," he laughed, "but Helen's such a _sturdy_ little wretch. The first things I ever noticed about her was her horse sense. She's good on her job, too. She seems to me like the West. Though that's rather amusing, for she's such a little bit of a thing. She's afraid she'll get fat. But she won't. She's not that kind."

"Why of course not," said Katie stoutly, and they laughed and seemed very near to Helen in thus scorning her fear of getting fat.

He continued his confidences, laughter from the porch coming down to them all the while. Helen was so real--she was so square--so independent--so dauntless--and yet she had such dear little ways. He couldn't make her sound as nice as she was; Katie would have to come and see her. In fact they were counting on Katie's coming. She was to come and stay a long time with them and really get acquainted with the West. "I'll tell you what Helen's like," he summed it up. "She's very much what you would have been if you'd lived out there and had the advantages she has."

Katie stared. No, he was not trying to be funny.

They started toward the house. "Katie," he broke out, "if you have any cousinly love in your heart, and know anything about Walt Whitman, tell me something, so I can go back and spring it on Helen. She's mad over him."

"He was one of the 'advantages' I didn't have," said Katie. "He didn't play a heavy part in the thing I had that passed for an education."

"Isn't it the limit the way they 'do you' at those girls' schools?"

agreed Fred sympathetically. "Helen says that in religion and education the more you pay the less you get."

"I should like her," laughed Katie.

But what would her Aunt Elizabeth think of a "sturdy little wretch,"

believing in the economic independence of woman--whatever that might be--with lots of horse sense, and good on her job!

Katie was on the outside now, and for good. If nothing else, the fun was out there. And there was something else. That light on Fred's face when he was trying to tell about Helen.

Captain Prescott had come down the steps to meet them. "I was just coming for you. Don't you think, Katie, it would be fun to look in on the dance up here at the club house?"

On the alert for shielding Ann, Katie demurred. It was late, and Ann was tired from her golf.

There was an eager little flutter, and Ann had stepped forward. "Oh, I'm not at all tired, Katie," she said.

"Does she _look_ tired?" scoffed Wayne. "She's only tired of being made to play the invalid. Hurry along, Katie. If you girls aren't sufficiently befrocked, frock up at once."

Katie hesitated, annoyed. She felt shorn of the function of her office.

And she was dubious. The party was one which the younger set over the river were giving--at the golf club-house on the Island--for the returned college boys. She did not know who might be there--she was always meeting friends of her friends. She felt a trifle injured in thinking that just for the sake of Ann she had avoided the social life those people offered her, and now--

Ann was speaking again, her voice stripped of the happy eagerness. "Just as you say, Katie. It is late, and perhaps I am--too tired."

That moved Katie. That a girl should not be privileged to be insistent about going to a dance--it seemed depriving her of her birthright. And more cruel than taking away a birthright was bringing the consciousness of having no birthright.

Katie entered gayly into the plans. They decided that Ann was to wear the rose-colored muslin--the same gown she had worn that first night. As she was fastening it for her Katie saw that Ann was smiling at herself in the mirror, giving herself little pats of approval here and there.

She had not done that the first time Katie helped her into that dress.

But it was the Ann of the first days who turned strained face to her in the dressing-room at the club-house. All the girlish radiance--girlish vanity--was gone. "Katie," she whispered, "I think I'd better go home.

I--I didn't know it would be like this. So many people--so many lights--and things."

Gently Katie reassured her. Ann needing her was the Ann she knew how to care for, and would care for in the face of all the people--all the "lights--and things." "You needn't dance if you don't want to," she told her. "I'll tell Wayne to look out for you, that you're really not able to meet people. If I put him on guard he'll go through fire and water for you."

"Yes--I know that," said Ann, and seemed to take heart.

And for some time she did not dance. From the floor Katie Would get glimpses of Ann and Wayne sauntering on the veranda on which the ball-room opened. More than once she found Ann's eyes following her--Ann out in the shadow, looking in at the gay people in the light.

But with the opening of a lively two-step Captain Prescott insisted Ann dance with him. "Oh come now," he urged. "Life's too short to sit on the side lines. This is a ripping two-step."

The music, too, was urgent--and persuasive. As if without volition she fell into gliding little steps, moving toward the dancing floor.

It was Katie who watched that time. She wanted to see Ann dancing. At first it puzzled her; she was too graceful not to dance well, but she danced as if differently trained, as if unaccustomed to their way of dancing. But as the two-step progressed she fell into the swing of it and seemed no different from the rest of the pretty, happy girls all about her.

She was radiant when she came back to them. Like the golf, the dancing seemed to have given her confidence--and confidence, happiness.

Though she still shrank from meeting people. Katie fell in with a whole troop of college boys who hovered around her, as both college boys and their elders were wont to hover around Katie. She wanted to bring some of them to Ann, but Ann demurred. "Oh no, Katie. I don't want to dance with any strange men, please. Just our own."

Why, Katie wondered, should one not wish to dance with "strange men." It seemed so curious a thing to shrink from. Katie herself had never felt at all strange with "strange men." Nice fellows were nice fellows the world over, and she never felt farther from strange than when dancing with a nice man--strange or otherwise. Even in the swing of her gayety Katie wondered what it was could make one feel like that. And she wondered what Wayne must think of that plaintive little "Just our own" which she was sure he had overheard.

Katie had come out at last to say she thought they should go. Ann must not get too tired.

But just then the orchestra began dreaming out a waltz, one of those waltzes lovers love to remember having danced together. "Now there," said Wayne, "is a nice peaceful waltz. You'll have to wait, Katie," and his arm was about Ann and they had glided away together.

Katie told her cousin she would rather not dance. "Let's stand here and watch," she said.

Couple after couple passed by, not the crowd of the gay two-step of a few moments before. Few were talking; some were gently humming, many dreaming--with a veiled smile for the dream. It was one of those waltzes to find its way back to cherished moments, flood with lovely color the dear things held apart. Fred was saying he wished Helen were there. Katie turned from the vivid picture out to the subtle night--warm summer's night. The dreaming music carried her back to vanished things--other waltzes, other warm summer's nights, to the times when she had been, in her light-hearted fashion, in love, to those various flirtations for which she had more tenderness than regret just for the glimpses they brought. And suddenly the heart of things gone seemed to flow into a great longing for that never known tenderness and wildness of feeling that sobbed in the music. She was being borne out to the heart of the night, and at the heart of the night some one waited for her with arms held out. But as she was swept nearer the some one was the man who mended the boats! With a little catch of her breath for that sorry twist of her consciousness that must make lovely moments ludicrous ones, she turned back to the bright room--crowded, colorful, moving room which seemed set in the vast, soft night.

Her brother was just passing--her brother and her friend Ann Forrest.

They did not look out at her. They did not seem to know that Katie was near. She had never seen Ann's face so beautiful. It had that beauty she had all the while seen as possible for it, only more intense, more exalted than she had been able to foresee it. The music stopped on a sob. Every one was still for an instant--then they were applauding for more. Ann was not clapping. Katie had never seen anything as beautiful as that look of rapt loveliness on Ann's face as she stood there waiting. She might have been the very spirit of love waiting in the mists at the heart of the night. As softly the music began again and Wayne once more guided her in and out among those boys and girls--boys and girls for whom life had meant little more than laughing and dancing--Katie had a piercing vision of the girl with her hands over her face stumbling on toward the river.

They were all very quiet on the way home.

That night just as she was falling asleep Katie was startled. It seemed at first she was being awakened by a sharp dart, one of those darts of apprehension seemed shot into her approaching slumber. But it was nothing more than Wayne whistling out on the porch, whistling the dreaming waltz which would bear one to the love waiting at the heart of the night.

But Katie was sleepy now. How did Wayne expect any one to go to sleep, she thought crossly, whistling at that time of night.

But across the hall was another girl who listened. She had not been asleep. She had been lying there looking out into the night, very wide awake. And when she heard the whistling she too sat up in bed, swaying ever so gently to the rhythm of it, inarticulately following it under her breath and smiling a hushed, tender little smile. Something lovely seemed stealing over her. But in the wake of it was something else--something cold, blighting. Before he had finished she had covered her ears with her hands, and was sobbing.

CHAPTER XV

As she looked back afterward upon that span of days, searching them, translating, Katie saw that the day of the golf and the dancing marked the farthest advance.

After that it was as if Ann, frightened at finding herself so far out in the open, shrank back into the shadows. But having gone a little way into the open she was not again the same girl of the shadows. Her response to life seeming thwarted, there came an incipient sullenness in her view of that life which she had reached over the bridge of make-believe.

It did not show itself at once, but afterward it seemed to Katie that the next day marked the beginning of Ann's retreat on the bridge of make-believe.