"Above your head is a motto. The motto says, 'God Is Love.' I could almost fancy somebody hung that in this house as a _joke_!

"You see you don't know anything about love. That's why you don't know anything about God--or life--or Ann.

"In this universe of mysterious things," Katie went on, "it so happened--as you have remarked, God's ways are indeed inscrutable--that unto you was born a child ordained for love."

She paused, held herself by the mystery of that.

And as she contemplated the mystery of it her wrath against him fell strangely away. Telling him what she thought of him suddenly ceased to be the satisfying thing she had anticipated. It was all too mysterious.

It grew so large and so strange that it did not seem a matter the Reverend Saunders had much to do with it. Telling him what she thought of him was not the thing interesting her then. What interested her was wondering why he was as he was. How it had all happened. What it all meant.

Her wondering almost drew her to him; certainly it gave her a new approach. "Oh isn't it a pity!" was what Katie said next. And there was pain and feeling and almost sympathy in her voice as she repeated, "Isn't it a pity!"

He, too, spoke differently--more humanly. "Isn't--what a pity?"

"That we bungle it so! That we don't seem to know anything about each other.

"Why I suppose you _didn't_ know--you simply didn't have it _in_ you to know--that the way she needed to serve God was by laughing and dancing!"

He was both outraged and drawn. He neither rebuked nor agreed. He waited.

"You see it was this way. You were one thing; she was another thing. And neither of you had any way of getting at the thing that the other was. So you just grew more intolerant in the things _you_ were, and that, I suppose, is the way hearts are broken and lives are spoiled."

Her eyes had filled. It had drawn her back to her mood of the morning.

"Doesn't it seem to you," she asked gently of the Reverend Saunders, "that it's just an awful pity?"

The Reverend Saunders did not reply. But he was not looking at Katie's quill or Katie's shoes. He was looking at Katie's wet eyes.

And Katie, as they sat there for a moment in silence, was not seeing him alone as the Reverend Saunders. She was seeing him as product of something which had begun way back across the centuries, seeing far back of the Reverend Saunders that spirit of intolerance which had shaped him--wrung him dry--spirit which in the very beginning had lost the meaning of those words which hung above the Reverend Saunders' head.

It seemed a childish thing to be blaming the Reverend Saunders for the things the centuries had made him.

Indeed, she no longer felt like "blaming" any one. Sorrow which comes through seeing leaves small room for blame.

Katie did not know as much about the history of mankind as she now wished she did--as she meant to know!--but there did open to her a glimpse of the havoc wrought by the forerunners of the Reverend Saunders--of all the children of love blighted in the name of a God of love.

She had risen. And as she looked at him again she was sorry for him.

Sterility of the heart seemed a thing for pity rather than scorn. "I'm sorry for you," she spoke it. "Oh I'm sorry for us all! We all bungle it!

We're all in the grip of dead things, aren't we? Do you suppose it will ever be any different?"

And still he looked, not at the quill or the shoes, but the eyes, eyes which seemed sorrowing with all the love sorrows of the centuries. "Young woman," he said uncertainly, "you puzzle me."

"I puzzle myself," said Katie, and wiped her eyes and laughed a little, thinking of the scornful exit she had meant to make after telling him what she thought of him.

She retraced her steps and waited for two hours at the station, reconstructing for herself Ann's girlhood in Centralia and thinking larger thoughts of the things which spoiled girlhoods, the pity of it all. And it seemed that even self-righteousness was not wholly to blame.

Katie felt a little lonely in losing her scorn of "goodness." She had so enjoyed hating the godly. If even they were to be gently grouped with the wicked as more to be pitied than hated, then whom would one hate?

Did knowing--seeing--spoil hating? And was all hating to go when all men saw?

At the last minute she had a fight with herself to keep from going back and refunding the missionary money! The missionary money worried Katie.

She wanted it paid back. But she saw that it was not her paying it back would satisfy her. She even felt that she had no right to pay it back.

CHAPTER XXX

She returned to Chicago to find that her uncle was in town. He had left a message asking her to join him for dinner over at his hotel.

It was pleasant to be dining with her uncle that night. The best possible antidote she could think of for Ann's father was her dear uncle the Bishop.

As she watched him ordering their excellent dinner she wondered what he would think of Ann's father. She could hear him calling Centralia a God-forsaken spot and Ann's father a benighted fossil. Doubtless he would speak of the Reverend Saunders as a type fast becoming obsolete. "And the quicker the better," she could hear him add.

But she fancied that the Reverend Saunderses of the world had yet a long course to run in the Centralias of the world. She feared that many Anns had yet to go down before them.

At any rate, her uncle was not that. To-night Katie loved him anew for his delightful worldliness.

Though he was not in his best form that night. He was on his way out to Colorado for the marriage of his son. "There was no doing anything about it," he said with a sigh. "My office has made me enough the diplomat, Katherine, to know when to quit trying. So I'm going out there--fearful trip--why it's miles from Denver--to do all I can to respectablize the affair. It seemed to me a trifle inconsiderate--in view of the effort I'm making--that they could not have waited until next month; there are things calling me to Denver then. Now what shall I do there all that time?--though I may run on to California. But it seems my daughter-in-law would have her honeymoon in the mountains while the aspens are just a certain yellow she's fond of. So of course"--with his little shrug Katie loved--"what's my having a month on my hands?"

"Well, uncle, dear uncle," she laughed, "hast forgotten the days when nothing mattered so much as having the leaves the right shade of yellow?"

"I have not--and trust I never will," he replied, with a touch of asperity; "but I feel that Fred has shown very little consideration for his parents."

"But why, uncle? I'm strong for her! She sounds to me like just what our family needs."

He gave her a glance over his glasses--that delighted Katie, too; she had long ago learned that when her uncle felt occasion demand he look like a bishop he lowered his chin and looked over his glasses.

"Well our family may need something; it's the first intimation I've had, Katherine, that it's in distress--but I don't see that a young woman who votes is the crying need of the family."

"She's in great luck," returned Katie, "to live in a State where she can vote."

He held up his hands. "_Katie? You_?"

"Oh I haven't prowled around this town all summer, uncle, without seeing things that women ought to be voting about."

He stared at her. "Well, Katie, you--you don't mean to take it up, do you?"

He looked so unhappy that she laughed. "Oh I don't know, uncle, what I mean to 'take up,' but I herewith serve notice that I'm going to take something up--something besides bridge and army gossip."

She looked at him reflectively. "Uncle, does it ever come home to you that life's a pretty serious business?"

"Well I hadn't wanted it to come home to me tonight," he sighed plaintively. "I'm really most upset about this unfortunate affair. I had thought that you, Katie, would be pleasant."

"Forgive me," she laughed. "I can see how it must disturb you, uncle, to hear me express a serious thought."

He laughed at her delightedly. He loved Katie. "You've got the fidgets, Katie. Just the fidgets. That's what's the matter with the whole lot of you youngsters. It's becoming an epidemic--a sort of spiritual measles.

Though I must say, I hadn't expected you to catch it. And just a word of warning, Katie. You've always been so unique as a trifler that one rather hates to see you swallowed up in the troop of serious-minded young women.

I was talking to Darrett the other day--charming fellow, Darrett--and he held that your charm was in your brilliant smile. I told him I hadn't thought so much about the brilliant smile, but that I knew a good deal about a certain impish grin. Katie, you have a very disreputable grin.