It was that gnawed at the heart of it.... How go to bed that night without knowing that Ann had a bed? She had loved Ann because Ann needed her, been tender to her because Ann was her charge. She yearned for her now in fearing for her. More sickening than the pain of having failed was the pain of wondering where Ann would get her breakfast. Tears which she had been able to hold back even under the shame of her infidelity came uncontrollably with the simple thought that she might never do Ann's hair for her again.

It seemed to Katie then that the one thing she could not do was go back to her guests.

A boy was coming on a bicycle. He had a letter for Katie.

She excused herself and went to the little room to read it--the same little room where they had been that afternoon.

It was but a hurried note. He had found nothing at the station except that the Chicago train was probably there at the time. Doubtless she had taken it. He had taken a chance and wired the train asking her to wire Katie immediately. That was all he could think of to do. He was taking the night train for Chicago--not that he knew of anything to do there, but perhaps she would like to feel there was some one there. He would have to go soon anyhow--might as well be that night. He would be there three or four days. He told Katie where to address him. He would do anything she asked.

He advised her, for the time, to remain where she was. Probably word would come to her there. She might be able to do more from there than elsewhere. It was not even certain Ann had gone to Chicago--by no means certain. And even if she had--how find her there if she did not wish to be found?

At the last: "I suppose you're very gay at your dinner just now.

That must be tough business--being gay. Don't let it harden your heart--as gayety like that could so easily do. And remember--you're _going on!_ You're not a quitter. And it's only the quitters stop when they fall down."

Below, shyly off in one corner, written very lightly as if he scarcely dared write it, she found: "You don't know what a wonderful thing it is to me just to know that you are in the world."

Katie went back to her guests with less gayety but more poise.

Major Darrett had remained for a good-night drink with Wayne. He came out to Katie as she was going up stairs.

"I was proud of you, Katie," he said.

"I take no pride in your approval!"

"You made a great hit, Katie."

"Not with myself."

"Katie," he suddenly demanded, "what were you up to? I can't get the run of it. For heaven's sake, what did you mean?"

"You wouldn't understand," she murmured wearily, for she was indeed so very weary then.

"Well, I'm afraid I wouldn't. I don't want to be harsh--when you've had such a hard day, but it looks to me as if you broke the rules."

"What rules?"

"Our rules. You didn't play the game fair, Katie--presenting her here. I never would have done that."

"No," she said, "I know. You put what you call the rules of life so far above life itself."

"And look here, Katie, what's this about Prescott? I'm not going to have him hurt. If he doesn't know the situation, and has any thought of marrying her--why I'm in honor bound to tell him."

That fired her. "Oh you are, are you? Well if your honor moves you to that I'll have a few things to say about that same 'honor' of yours! To our distinguished guest of this evening, for instance," she laughed.

He lost color, but quickly recovered himself. "Oh come now, Katie, you and I are not going to quarrel."

"No, not if you can help it. That wouldn't be your way. But do you know what I think of the 'game' you play?"

She had gone a little way up the stairs, and was standing looking back at him. Her eyes were shining feverishly.

"I think it's a game for cheats."

He did go colorless at that. "That's not the sort of thing you can say to a man, Katie," he said in shaking voice.

"A game for cheats," she repeated. "The cheats who cheat with life--and then make rules around their cheating and boast about the 'honor' of keeping those rules. You'd scorn a man who cheated at cards. Oh you're very virtuous--all of you--in your scorn of lesser cheats. What's cards compared with the divinest thing in life!"

"I tell you, I played fair," he insisted, his voice still unsteady.

"Why to be sure you did--according to the rules laid down by the cheats!"

Wayne came upon her upstairs a little later, sobbing. And sobbingly she told the story--her face buried too much of the time for her to see her brother's face, too shaken by her own sobs to mark how strange was his breathing. Wayne did not accuse her of not having played a fair game. He said almost nothing at all, save at the last, and that under his breath: "We'll move heaven and earth to get her back!"

His one reproach was--"Oh Katie--you might have told _me_!"

CHAPTER XXVII

But they did not get her back. July had passed, and August, and most of September, and they had not found Ann.

Heaven and earth were not so easily moved.

Katie had tried, and the man who mended the boats had tried, and Wayne, but to no avail.

There had come the one letter from her--letter seeking to save "Ann" for Katie. It was a key to Ann, but no key to her whereabouts save that it was postmarked Chicago.

Those last three months had impressed Katie with the tragic indefiniteness of the Chicago postmark.

She had spent the greater part of the summer there, at a quiet little hotel on the North Side, where she was nominally one of a party of army women. That was the olive branch to her Aunt Elizabeth on the chaperone question. For her own part, she had seen too many unchaperoned girls in Chicago that summer to care whether she was chaperoned or not.

Her army friends thought Katie interested in some work which she did not care to talk about. They thought it interesting, though foolhardy to let it bring those lines. Katie was not a beauty, they said among themselves, and could not afford lines. Her charm had always been her freshness, her buoyancy and her blitheness. Now if she lost that--

Wayne had been there from time to time. It was but a few hours' ride from the Arsenal, and his detail to his individual work gave him considerable liberty.

He, too, had more "lines" in September than he had had in June. That they attributed to his "strenuousness" in his work, and thought it to be deplored. After all, the department might throw him down--who knew what it might not do?--and then what would have been the use? For a man who did not have to live on his pay, Captain Jones was looked upon as unnecessarily serious.

But Katie suspected that it was not alone devotion to military science had traced those lines. It surprised her a little that they should have come, but to Katie herself it was so vital and so tragic a thing that it was not difficult to accept the fact of its marking any one who came close to it. After that night at the dance there had several times stirred a vague uneasiness, calling out the thought that it was a good thing Wayne was, as she loosely thought it, immune. But even that uneasiness was lost now in sterner things.

She had never gone into her reasons for looking upon her brother as "immune." It was an idea fixed in her mind by her association with his unhappiness with Clara. Knowing how much he had given, she thought of him as having given all. Her sense of the depth of his hurt had unanalyzed associations with finality, associations intrenched by Wayne's growing "queerness."

It could not be said, however, that that queerness had stood in the way of his doing all he could. Some of the best suggestions had come from him. And Katie had reasons for suspecting he had done some searching of his own which he did not report to her.

She knew that he was worried about her, though he understood too well to ask her to give up and turn back to her own life.

Her gratitude to Wayne for that very understanding made her regret the more her inability to be frank with him about the man who mended the boats. She had had to tell him at first that he was helping, but Wayne had seemed to think it so strange, had appeared so little pleased with the idea, that she had not seen it as possible to make a clean breast of it. She told him that she had talked with him about Ann--that was because he had seen her, knew more about it than she did. And that she had talked with him again the day Ann left, thinking he might have seen her. That Wayne had not liked. "You should have sent for me," he said. "Never take outsiders into your confidence in intimate matters like that."

And what she had not found it possible to try to make clear to him was that the man who mended the boats seemed to her anything but an outsider.