She laughed and brushed away a tear. "You know in the army we don't have homes."

"Well you have temporary homes," he insisted, as each moment she seemed to become more worn. "You know what I mean. Go back to your brother's."

"He'll be ordered from there very soon. There'll not be a place there for me much longer."

He did not seem to have reckoned with that. His face changed. "Then where will you go, Katie?" he asked, very low. "What will you do?"

She shook her head. "I don't know. I don't know where I'll go--and I don't know what I'll do."

They stood there in silence, drawn close by thought of separation.

"Shall we walk on?" she said at last. "I've lost the feeling that we're going to find Ann to-night."

And so, still silently, they walked on.

But when, after a moment, he looked at her, it was to see that she was making heroic effort to control the tears. "Katie!" he murmured, "what is it?"

"We're giving up," she said, and could not say more.

"Why no we're not! It's only the method we're giving up. This way of doing it. You've tried this long enough."

"But what else is there? Just looking. Just keeping on looking--and hoping. Just the chance. What other method is there?"

"We'll find some other," he insisted, not willing, when she looked like that, to speak his fears. "There'll be some other way. But you can't keep on this way--dear."

There was another silence--a different one: silence which opened to receive them at the throb in his voice as he spoke that last word.

He had to go back that night. "Well?" he asked gently, as they neared her hotel.

"I'll be down in a couple of days," replied Katie, not steadily.

"And you'll be there a little while, won't you," he asked wistfully, "before you go--you don't know where?"

"Yes," she said, turning her eyes upon him for just an instant, "a little while--before I go--I don't know where."

But though she was going--she didn't know where--though she was giving up--seemed conquered--through all the uncertainty and the sadness there surged a strange new joy in their hearts as, very slowly, they walked that final block.

At the door, after a moment's full silence, she held out her hand. "And you'll be down there--mending boats?"

He nodded, his eyes going where words had not ventured.

"And you'll--come and see me?" she asked shyly. "You don't mean, do you,"--looking away, as if with scarcely the courage to say it--"that I'm to 'stop'--everything?"

"No, Katie," he said, and his voice was shaking, "I think you must know I do not mean you are to--stop everything."

As they lingered for a final moment, they were alone--far out in the sweet wild new places of the spirit; and all that man had ever yearned for, all joy that had been given and all joy denied seemed as a rich sea--fathomless sea--swelling just beneath that sweet wild new thing that had fluttered to consciousness in their hearts.

CHAPTER XXVIII

The new life in her heart gave her new courage that night to look out at life. She faced what before that she had evaded consciously facing.

Perhaps they would not find Ann at all. Perhaps Ann had given up--as they were giving up. Perhaps Ann was not there to be found.

It was her fight against that fear had kept her so much in the crowds.

Ann was there. She had only to find her. Leaving the crowds seemed to be admitting that Ann was not in them; for if she really felt she was in them, surely she would not consent to leaving them.

That idea of Ann's not being there was as a shadow which had from time to time crept beside her. In the crowds she lost it. There were so many in the crowds. Ann, too, was in the crowds. She had only to stay in them and she must find her.

Now she was leaving them; and it was he who understood the crowds was telling her to leave them. Did _he_ think she was not there? Why had she not had the courage to press it? There was so much they should have been talking of in those last blocks--and they had talked of nothing.

But the new warmth flooded Katie's heart at thought of having talked of nothing. What was there to talk about so important as talking of nothing? In a new way it drew her back to the crowds; the crowds that talked so loudly of many unlovely things in order to still in their hearts that call for the loveliness of talking of nothing.

It gave her new understanding of Ann. Ann was one who must rest in the wonder of talking of nothing. It was for that she had gone down. The world had destroyed her for the very thing for which life loved her--Katie joining with the world.

She would not have done that to-night. To-night, in the face of all the world, she must have joined with life.

She wondered if all along it was not the thing for which she had most loved Ann. This shy new thing in her own heart seemed revealing Ann. It was kin to her, and to Katie's feeling for her.

Many times she had wondered why she cared so terribly, would ask herself, as she could hear her friends asking if they knew: "But does it matter so much as all this?"

She had never been able to make clear to herself why it mattered so much--mattered more than anything else mattered. None of the reasons presenting themselves on the surface were commensurate to the depth of the feeling. To-night she wondered if deep below all else might not lie that thing of Ann's representing life, her failure with Ann meaning infidelity to life.

It turned her to Ann's letter;--she had not had the courage to read it for a number of days.

"Katie," Ann had written, "I'm writing to try and show you that you were not all wrong. That there was something there. And I'm not doing it for myself, Katie. I'm doing it for you.

"If I can just forget I'm writing about myself, feel instead that I'm writing about somebody you've cared for, believed in, somebody who has disappointed and hurt you, trying to show you--for _your_ sake--if I don't mind being either egotistical or terrible for the sake of showing you--

"It's not _me_ that matters, Katie--it's what you thought of me. That's why I'm writing.

"I never could talk to you right. For a long time I couldn't talk at all, and then that night I talked most of the night I didn't tell the real things, after all. And at the last I told you something I knew would hurt you without telling you the things that might keep it from hurting, without saving for you the things you had thought you saw. I don't know why I did that--desperate, I suppose, because it was all spoiled, frantic because I was helpless to keep it from being spoiled. And then I said things to _you_--that must show--And yet, Katie, as long as I'm trying to be honest I've got to say again, though all differently, that I was surprised--shocked, I suppose, at something in the way you looked. It's just a part of your world that I don't understand. It's as I told you--we've lived in different worlds. Things--some things--that seem all right in yours--well, it's just surprising that you should think them all right. In your world the way you do things seems to matter so much more than what you do.

"I've gone, Katie, and as far as I'm concerned it's what has to be. You see you couldn't fit me in. The only thing I can do for you now is to--stay gone. You'll feel badly--oh, I know that--but in the end it won't be as bad as trying to fit me in, trying to keep it up. And I can't have you doing things for me in another way--as you'd want to--because--it's hard to explain just what I mean, but after I've been Ann I couldn't be just somebody you were helping. It meant too much to me to be Ann to become just a girl you're good to.

"What I'd rather do--want this letter to do--is keep for you that idea of Ann--memory of her.

"So that's why I want to tell you about some things that really were Ann.

I haven't any more right to you, but I want you to know you have some right to her.

"I told you that I was standing on the corner, and that he asked me to get in the automobile, and that I did, and that that--began it. It was true. It was one way to put it. I'll try and put it another way.

"It isn't even fair to him, putting it that way. You know, of course, that he's not in the habit of asking girls on corners to go with him. I think--there at the first--he was sorry for me. I think it was what you would call an impulse and that being sorry for me had more to do with it than anything else.

"And I know I wasn't fair to myself when I put it that way; and you weren't fair to me when you called it common and low. That's what I want to try and show you--that it wasn't that.