From the far country in which she was dreaming she heard Captain Prescott talking about girls. He was talking sentimentally, but even his sentiment opened no vistas.

And suddenly she remembered how she had at one time thought it possible she would marry him. The remembrance appalled her; less in the idea of marrying him than in the consciousness of how far she had gone from the place where marrying him suggested itself to her at all.

Life had become different. This showed her how vastly different.

But as he talked on she began to feel that it had not become as different to him as to her. He had not been making little excursions up and down unknown paths. He had remained right in his place. That place seemed to him the place for Katie Jones.

As he talked on--about what he called Life--sublimely unconscious of the fences all around him shutting out all view of what was really life--it became unmistakable that Captain Prescott was getting ready to propose to her. She had had too much experience with the symptoms not to recognize them.

Katie did not want to be proposed to. She was in no mood for dealing with a proposal. She had too many other things to be thinking of, wondering about.

But she reprimanded herself for selfishness. It meant something to him, whether it did to her or not. She must be kind--as kind as she could.

The kindest thing she could think of was to keep him from proposing. To that end she answered every sentimental remark with a flippant one.

It grieved, but did not restrain him. "I had thought you would understand better, Katie," he said.

Something in his voice made her question the kindness of her method.

Better decline a love than laugh at it.

He talked on of how he had, at various times, cared--in a way, he said--for various girls, but had never found the thing he knew was fated to mean the real thing to him; Katie had heard it all before, and always told with that same freedom from suspicion of its ever having been said before. But perhaps it was the very fact that it was familiar made her listen with a certain tenderness. For she seemed to be listening, less to him than to the voice of by-gone days--all those merry, unthinking days which in truth had dealt very kindly and generously with her.

She had a sense of leaving them behind. That alone was enough to make her feel tenderly toward them. Even a place within a high-board fence, intolerable if one thought one were to remain in it, became a kindly and a pleasant spot from the top of the fence. Once free to turn one's face to the wide sweep without, one was quite ready to cast loving looks back at the enclosure.

And so she softened, prepared to deal tenderly with Captain Prescott, as he seemed then, less the individual than the incarnation of outlived days.

It was into that mellowed, sweetly melancholy mood he sent the following:

"And so, Katie, I wanted to talk to you about it. You're such a good pal--such a bully sort--I wanted to tell you that I care for Ann--and want to marry her."

She dropped from the high-board fence with a jolt that well-nigh knocked her senseless.

"I suppose," he said, "that you must have suspected."

"Well, not exactly suspected," said Katie, feeling her bumps, as it were.

Her first emotion was that it was pretty shabby treatment to accord one who was at such pains to be kind. It gave one a distinctly injured feeling--getting all sweet and mellow only to be dashed to the ground and let lie there in that foolish looking--certainly foolish feeling heap!

But as soon as she had picked herself up--and Katie was too gamey to be long in picking herself up--she wondered what under heaven she was going to do about things! What had she let herself in for now! The pains of an injured dignity--throb of a pricked self love--were forgotten in this real problem, confronting her. She even grew too grave to think about how funny it was.

For Katie saw this as genuinely serious.

"Harry," she asked, "have you said anything to your mother?"

"Well, not _said_ anything," he laughed.

"But she knows?"

"Mother's keen," he replied.

"I once thought I was," was Katie's unspoken comment.

"And have you--you are so good as to confide in me, so I presume to ask questions--have you said anything to Ann?"

"No, not _said_ anything," he laughed again.

"But _she_ knows?"

"I don't know. I wondered if you did."

"No," said Katie, "I don't. Truth is I've been so wrapped up in my own affairs--some things I've had on my mind--that I haven't been thinking about people around me falling in love."

"People are always falling in love," he remarked sentimentally. "One should always be prepared for that."

"So it seems," replied Katie. "And yet one is not always--entirely prepared."

She had picked herself up from her fall, but she was not yet able to walk very well. Fortunately he was too absorbed in his own happy striding to mark her hobbling.

A young man talking of his love does not need a brilliant conversationalist for companion.

And he was a young man in love--that grew plain. Had Katie ever seen such eyes? And as for the mouth--though perhaps most remarkable of all was the voice. Just what did it make Katie think of? He enumerated various things it made him think of, only to express his dissatisfaction with them all as inadequate. Had Katie ever seen any one so beautiful? And with such an adorable shy little way? Had Katie ever heard her say anything about him? Did she think he had any chance? Was there any other fellow? Of course there must have been lots of other fellows in love with her--a girl like that--but had she cared for any of them? Would Katie tell him something about her? She had been reserved about herself--the kind of reserve a fellow wouldn't try to break through. Would Katie tell him of her life and her people? Not that it made any difference with him--oh, he wanted just her. But his mother would want to know--Katie knew how mothers were about things like that. And he did want his mother to like her. Surely she would. How could she help it?

She wondered if Ann knew him for a young man in love. Katie's heart hardened against Ann at the possibility. That would not be playing a fair game. Ann was not in position to let Katie's friends fall in love with her. Katie had not counted on that.

"Have you any reason," she asked, "to think Ann cares for you?"

He laughed happily. "N--o; only I don't think it displeases her to have me say nice things to her." And again he laughed.

Then Ann had encouraged him. A girl had no business to encourage a man to say nice things to her when she knew nothing could come of it.

But Katie's memory there nudged Katie's primness; memory of all the men who had been encouraged to say nice things to Katie Jones, even when it was not desirable--or perhaps even possible--that anything could "come of it."

But of course that was different. Ann was in no position to permit nice things being said to her.

"Katie," he was asking, "where did you first meet her? How did you come to know her? Can't you tell me all about it?"

There came a mad impulse to do so. To say: "I first met her right down there at the edge of the water. She was about to commit suicide. I don't know why. I think she was one of those 'Don't You Care' girls you admired in 'Daisey-Maisey.' But I'm not sure of even that. I didn't want her to kill herself, so I took her in and pretended she was a friend of mine. I made the whole thing up. I even made up her name. She said her name was Verna Woods, but I think that's a made-up name, too. I haven't the glimmering of an idea what her real name is, who her people are, where she came from, or why she wanted to kill herself."

Then what?

First, bitter reproaches for Katie. She would be painted as having violated all the canons.

For the first time, watching her friend's face softened by his dreams, seeing him as his mother's son, she questioned her right to violate them.

She did not know why she had not thought more about it before. It had seemed such a _joke_ on the people in the enclosure. But it was not going to be a joke to hurt them. Was that what came of violating the canons?

Was the hurt to one's friends the punishment one got for it?

"You can't cauterize the wounds with the story of the dog's hard life,"

Wayne had said of poor little unpetted--and because unpetted, unpettable--Pet.