CHAPTER V

"Nora," said Katie next morning, "Miss Forrest has had a great misfortune."

Nora paused in her dusting, all ready with the emotion which Katie's tone invited.

"She has lost all of her luggage!"

"The poor young lady!" cried good Nora.

"Yes, it is really terrible, isn't it? Everything lost; through the carelessness of the railroads, you know. And such beautiful gowns as they were. So--so unusual. Poor Miss Ann was forced to arrive in a dress most unsuited to traveling, and is now quite--oh quite--destitute."

Nora held her head with both hands, speechless.

"Didn't you tell me, Nora, that your cousin's wife was very clever at sewing--at fixing things over?"

"Yes, yes, Miss Kate--yes'm."

"I wonder, Nora, would she come and help us?"

"She would be that glad, Miss Kate. She--"

"You see, Miss Ann is not very well. She--poor Miss Ann, I hope you will be very kind to her. She is an orphan, like you, Nora."

Nora wiped both eyes.

"And just now it would be too dreadful for her to have to see about a lot of things. So I think, temporarily, we could arrange some of my things; let them down a little, and perhaps take them in--Miss Ann is a little taller and a little slimmer than I. Could you send for your cousin's wife to help us, Nora?"

Profusely, o'erflowingly, Nora affirmed that this would be possible.

When Captain Jones came in from the shops for luncheon it was to find his sister installed in the hall, one of those roomy halls adapted to all purposes of living, some white and pink and blue things strewn around her, doing something with a scissors. Just what she was doing seemed to concern him very little, for he sat down at a table near her, pulled out some blue prints, and began studying them. "Thank heaven for the saving qualities of firearms," mused Katherine, industriously letting out a tuck.

But luncheon seemed to suggest the social side of life, for after they were seated he asked: "Oh yes, by the way, where's Miss--"

"Ann is still sleeping," replied Kate easily.

"She must be a good sleeper," ventured Wayne.

"Ann is tired, Wayne," she said with reproving dignity, "and as I have already told you several times without seeming to reach through the bullets on your brain, not well. She is here for a rest. She may not come down for several days."

"Not what one would call a hilarious guest," he commented.

"No, less hilarious than Zelda Fraser." Katie spitefully mentioned a former guest whom Wayne had particularly detested.

He laughed. "Well, who is she? What did you say her name was?"

"Oh Wayne," she sighed long-sufferingly, "again--once again--let me tell you that her name is Forrest."

"What Forrest?"

"'Um, I don't believe you know Ann's people."

"Not the Major Forrest family?"

"No, not that family; not army people at all."

"Well, what people? I can't seem to place her."

"Ann is of--artistic people. Her father was a great artist. That is, he would have been a great artist had he not died when he was very young."

"Rather an assumption, isn't it, that a man would have--"

"Why not at all, if he has done enough during his brief lifetime to warrant the assumption."

"Is her mother living?"

"Oh no," said Katie irritably, "certainly not. Her mother has been dead--five years." Then, looking into the dreamy distance and drawing it out as though she loved it: "Her mother was a great musician."

"I shan't like her," announced Wayne decisively; "she is probably exotic and self-conscious and supercilious, and not at all a comfortable person to have about. It's bad enough for her father to have been a great artist--without her mother needs having been a great musician."

"She is simple and sweet and very shy," reproved Kate. "So shy that she will doubtless be painfully embarrassed at meeting you, and seem--well, really ill at ease."

"That will be an odd spectacle--a young woman of to-day 'painfully embarrassed' at meeting a man. I never saw any of them very ill at ease, save when there were no men about."

"Ann's experiences have not all been happy ones, Wayne," said Katie in the manner of the deeply understanding to one of lesser comprehension.

"I hope she'll go on sleeping. A young woman of artistic people--painfully embarrassed--unhappy experiences--it doesn't sound at all comfortable to me."

But a little later he said: "Prescott seems to think that Daisey-Maisey company not bad. If you girls would like to go we'll telephone for seats."

Katie paused in the eating of a peach. "Thank you, Wayne, but I have an idea--just a vague sort of idea--that Ann would not care especially for that."

"She's probably right," said Wayne, returning with relief to the blue prints.

Katie's sporting blood was up. Ann was to be Ann. Never in her life had she been so fascinated with anything as with this creation of an Ann.

"I have prepared a place for her," she mused, over the untucking of the softest of rose pink muslins. "I have prepared for her a family and a temperament and a sorrow and all that a young woman could most desire. From out the nothing a conscious something I have evoked. It would be most ungracious--ungrateful--of Ann to refuse to be what I made her. I invented her. By all laws of decency, she must be Ann.

Indeed, she _is_ Ann."

And Katie was truly beginning to think so. Katie's imagination coquetted successfully with conviction.

Ann, or more accurately the idea of Ann, fascinated her. Never before had she known any one all unencumbered, unbound, by facts. Most people were rendered commonplace by the commonplace things one knew about them.

But Ann was as interesting as one's brain could make her. Anything one choose to think--or say--about Ann could just as well as not be true. It swept one all unchained out into a virgin land of fancy.

There was but one question. Could Ann keep within hailing distance of one's imagination? Did Ann have it in her to live up to the things one wished to believe about her? Was she capable of taking unto herself the past and temperament with which one would graciously endow her? Katie's sense of justice forced from her the admission that it was expecting a good deal of Ann. She could see that nothing would be more bootless than thrusting traditions upon people who would not know what to do with them.