"Yes--to quarrel. I wonder if we always would."

"I haven't a doubt of it in the world," said Katie feelingly, and they laughed together as friends laugh together.

"Well, where did I leave myself? Oh yes--waiting. Sitting there busily engaged in hating you. Then she came across the grass--making straight for the river--running. I saw that you saw, and the thing that mattered to me then was what you would do about it. Saved or not saved, she was gone--I thought. The crowd had squeezed it all out of her. The live thing to me was what you--the You of the world that you became to me--would do about her."

He paused, smiling at that absurd and noble vision of Katie tumbling down the bunker. "And when you did what you did do--it was so treacherously disarming, the quick-witted humanity, the clever tenderness of it--I loved you so for it that I just couldn't go on hating. There's where you're a dangerous person. How dare you--standing for the You of the world--dampen the splendid ardor of my hate?"

Katie did not let pass her chance. "Perhaps if the Me of the world were known a little more intimately it would be less hated."

He shook his head. "They just happened to have you. They can't keep you."

There was another one of those pauses which drew them so much closer than the words. She knew what he was wondering, and he knew that she knew. At length she colored a little and called him back to the greater reserve of words.

"I saw how royally you put it through. I could see you standing there on the porch, looking back to the river. I've wanted several things rather badly in my life, but I doubt if I've ever wanted anything much worse than to know what you were saying. And then with my own two eyes I saw the miracle: Saw her--the girl who had just had all the concentrated passion of the Her of the world--turn and follow you into the house. It was a blow to me! Oh 'twas an awful blow."

"Why a blow?"

"In the first place that you should want to, and then that you should be able to. My philosophy gives you of the sunny paths no such desire nor power."

"Showing," she deduced quickly and firmly, "that your philosophy is all wrong."

"Oh no; showing that the much toasted Miss Katherine Jones is too big for mere sunny paths. Showing that she has a latent ambition to climb a mountain in a storm."

Fleetingly she wondered how he should know her for the much toasted Miss Katherine Jones, but in the center of her consciousness rose that alluring picture of climbing a mountain in a storm.

"Tell me how you did it."

"Why--I don't know. I had no method. I told her I needed her."

"_You_--needed _her_?"

"And afterwards, in a different way, I told her that again. And I did. I do."

"Why do you need her? How do you need her?" he urged gently.

She hesitated. Her mouth--her splendid mouth shaped by stern or tender thinking to lines of exquisite fineness or firmness--trembled slightly, and the eyes which turned seriously upon him were wistful. "Perhaps,"

said Katie, "that even on sunny paths one guesses that there are such things as storms in the mountains."

It was only his eyes which answered, but the fullness of the response ushered them into a silence in which they rested together understandingly.

"I sat there watching the house," he went back to it after the moment. "I was sure the girl would come out again. 'She'll bungle it,' I said to myself. 'She'll never be able to put it through.' But time passed--and she did not come out!"--inconsistently enough that came with a ring of triumph. "And then the next day--after the wonder had grown and grown--I saw her driving with you. I was just off the head of the Island. She was turned toward me, looking up the river. Again I saw her eyes, and in them that time I read _you_. And I don't believe," he concluded with a little laugh, "that my stock of hate can ever be quite so secure again."

They talked on, not conscious that it was growing late. Time and place, and the conventions of time and place, seemed outside. She let him in quite freely: to that edge of fun and excitement as well as to the strange and somber places. It was fun sharing fun with him; and something in his way of receiving it suggested that he had been in need of sharing some one's fun. He had a way of looking at her when she laughed that had vague suggestion of something not far from gratitude.

But the fun light, and that other light which seemed wanting to thank her for something, went from his eyes, leaving a glimmer of something deeper as he asked: "But you've never asked for her story? You've demanded nothing?"

"Why no," said Katie; "only that I should be proud if she ever felt I could help."

He turned his face a little away. One looking into it then would not have given much for his stock of hate.

Worth had approached. "Ain't you getting awful hungry, Aunt Kate?"

It recalled her, and to embarrassment. "We must go at once," she said, confused.

"Did you find out all you wanted to know from him, Aunt Kate?" he asked, getting in the boat.

She transcended her embarrassment. "No, Worth. Only that there is a very great deal I would like to know."

He was standing ready to push her boat away. She did not give the word.

As she looked at him she had a fancy that she was leaving him in a lonely place--she who was going back to what he called the sunny paths. And not only did she feel that he was lonely, but she felt curiously lonely herself, sitting there waiting to tell him to push her away. She wanted to say, "Come and see me," but she was too bound by the things to which she was returning to put it in the language of those things. And so she said, and the new shyness brought its own sweetness:

"You tell me to come to you if I need a guide. Thank you for that. I shall remember. And perhaps sunshine is a thing that soaks in and can be stored up, and given out again. If it ever seems I can be of any use--in any way--will you come where you know you can find me?"

Her eyes fell before the things which had leaped to his.

CHAPTER XIX

Two hours later she found herself alone on the porch with Captain Prescott.

A good deal had happened in the meantime.

Mrs. Prescott had arrived during Katie's absence, a stop-over of two weeks having been shortened to two hours because of the illness of her friend. Her room at her son's quarters being uninhabitable because of fresh paint, Wayne had insisted she come to them, and she was even then resting up in Ann's room, or rather the room which had been put at her disposal, a bed having been arranged for Ann in Katie's room. Had Katie been at home she would have planned it some other way, for above all things she did not want it to occur to Ann that she was in the way. But Katie had been very busy talking to the man who mended the boats, and naturally it would not occur to Wayne that Ann would be at all sensitive about giving up her room for a few days to accommodate a dear old friend of theirs. And perhaps she was not sensitive about it, only this was no time, Katie felt, to make Ann feel she was crowding any one.

And in Katie's absence "Pet" had been shot. Pet had not seemed to realize that alley methods of defense were not in good repute in the army. He could not believe that Pourquoi and N'est-ce-pas had no guile in their hearts when they pawed at him. Furthermore, he seemed to have a prejudice against enlisted men and showed his teeth at several of them.

Katie began to explain that that was because--but Wayne had curtly cut her short with saying that he didn't care why it was, the fact that it was had made it impossible to have the dog around. If one of the men had been bitten by the contemptible cur Katie couldn't cauterize the wound with the story of the dog's hard life.

The only bright spot she could find in it was that probably Watts had taken a great deal of pleasure in executing Wayne's orders--and Caroline Osborne said that all needed pleasure.

She saw that Ann's hands were clenched, and so had not pursued the discussion.

Katie was not in high favor with her brother that night. He said it was outrageous she should not have been there to receive Mrs. Prescott. When Katie demurred that she would have been less outrageous had she had the slightest notion Mrs. Prescott would be there to be received, it developed that Wayne was further irritated because he had come to take Ann out for a boat ride--and Katie had gone in the boat--heaven only knew where! Then when Katie sought to demolish that irritation with the suggestion that just then was the most beautiful time of day for the river--and she knew it would do Ann good to go--Wayne clung manfully to his grievance, this time labeling it worry. He forbade Katie's going any more by herself. It was preposterous she should have stayed so long. He would have been out looking for her had it not been that Watts had been able to get a glimpse of the boat pulled in on the upper island.

Katie wondered what else Watts had been able to get a glimpse of.

Wayne was so bent on being abused (hot days affected people differently) that the only way she could get him to relinquish a grievance for a pleasure was to put it in the form of a duty. Ann needed a ride on the river, Katie affirmed, and so they had gone, Wayne doing his best to cover his pleasure.

"Men never really grow up," she mused to Wayne's back. "Every so often they have to act just like little boys. Only little boys aren't half so apt to do it."

Though perhaps Wayne had been downright disappointed at not having the boat for Ann when he came home. Was he meaning to deliver that lecture on the army? She hoped that whatever he talked about it would bring Ann home without that strained, harassed look.

And now Katie was talking to Captain Prescott and thinking of the man who mended the boats. Captain Prescott was a good one to be talking to when one wished to be thinking of some one else. He called one to no dim, receding distances.

She was thinking that in everything save the things which counted most he was not unlike this other man--name unknown. Both were well-built, young, vigorous, attractive. But life had dealt differently with them, and they were dealing differently with life. That made a difference big as life itself.