The children still waited as he rang an inhospitable doorbell, as interested in life as if life had been treating them well.

He had to ring again before a woman came to the door with a cup in her hand which she was wiping on a greasy towel.

She looked very much as the bell had sounded.

She let him in to a place which it seemed might not be a bad field for some of the army's boasted experts on sanitation. It was a place to make one define civilization as a thing that reduces smell.

Several heads were stuck out of opening doors and with each opening door a wave stole out from an unlovely life. Captain Wayneworth Jones, U. S. Army, dressed for dining at a place where lives are better protected against lives, was a strange center for those waves from lives of struggle.

"She the girl that's sick?" the woman demanded in response to his inquiry for Miss Forrest.

He replied that he feared she was ill and was told to go to the third floor and turn to the right. It was the second door.

He hesitated, coloring.

"Would you be so kind as to tell her I am here? I think perhaps she may prefer to see me--down here."

The woman stared, then laughed. She looked like an evil woman as she laughed, but perhaps a laughing saint would look evil with two front teeth gone.

"Well we ain't got no _parlor_ for the young ladies to see their young men in," she said mockingly. "And if you climbed as many stairs as I did--"

"I beg your pardon," said he, and started up the stairway.

On the second floor were more waves from lives of struggle. The matter would be solemnly taken up in Congress if it were soldiers who were housed in the ill-smelling place. Evidently Congress did not take women and children and disabled civilians under the protecting wing of its indignation.

Wet clothes were hanging down from the third floor. They fanned back and forth the fumes of cabbage and grease. He grew sick, not at the thing itself, but at thought of its being where he was to find Ann.

Though the fact that he was to find her made all the rest of it--the fact that people lived that way--even the fact of her living that way--things that mattered but dimly.

As he looked at the woman in greasy wrapper who was shaking out the wet clothes he had a sudden mocking picture of Ann as she had been that night at the dance.

The woman's manner in staring at him as he knocked at Ann's door infuriated him.

But when the door was opened--by Ann--he instantly forgot all outside.

He closed the door and stood leaning against it, looking at her. For the moment that was all that mattered. And in that moment he knew how much it mattered--had mattered all along. Even how Ann looked was for the moment of small consequence in comparison with the fact that Ann was there.

But he saw that she was indeed ill--worn--feverish.

"You are not well," were his first words, gently spoken.

She shook her head, her eyes brimming over.

He looked about the room. It was evident she had been lying on the bed.

"I want you to lie down," he said, his voice gentle as a woman's to a child. "You know you don't mind me. I come as one of the family."

He helped her back to the bed; smoothed her pillow; covered her with the miserable spread.

Ann hid her face in the pillow, sobbing.

He pulled up the one chair the room afforded, laid his hand upon her hair, and waited. His face was white, his lips trembling.

"It's all over now," he murmured at last. "It's all over now."

She shook her head and sobbed afresh.

His heart grew cold. What did she mean? A fear more awful than any which had ever presented itself shot through him. But she raised her head and as she looked at him he knew that whatever she meant it was not that.

"What is it about Katie?" she whispered.

"Why, Ann, can't you guess what it is about Katie? Didn't you know what Katie must suffer in your leaving like that?"

"I left so she wouldn't have to suffer."

"Well you were all wrong, Ann. You have caused us--" But as, looking into her face, he saw what she had suffered, he was silenced.

She was feverish; her eyes were large and deep and perilously bright, her temples and cheeks cruelly thin. But what hurt him most were not the marks of illness and weakness. It was the harassed look. Fear.

_Fear_--that thing so invaluable in building character.

Thought of the needlessness of it wrung from him: "Ann--how could you!"

"Why I thought I was doing right," she murmured. "I thought I was being kind."

He smiled faintly, sadly, at the irony and the bitter pity of that.

"But how could you think that?" he pressed. "Not that it matters now--but I don't see how you could."

She looked at him strangely. "Do you--know?"

He nodded.

"Then don't you see? I left to make it easy for Katie."

He thought of Katie's summer. "Well your success in that direction was not brilliant," he said with his old dryness.

Her eyes looked so hurt that he stroked her hand reassuringly, as he would have stroked Worth's had he hurt him. And as he touched her--it was a hot hand he touched--it struck him as absurd to be quibbling about why she had gone. She was there. He had found her. That was all that mattered.

He became more and more conscious of how much it mattered. He wanted to draw her to him and tell her how much it mattered. But he did not--dared not.

"And how did you happen to be so unkind as to call me up, Ann?" he asked with a faint smile.

"I wanted--I wanted to hear about Katie. And I wanted"--her eyes had filled, her chin was trembling--"I was lonesome. I wanted to hear your voice."

His heart leaped. For the moment he was not able to keep the tenderness from his look.

"And I knew you were there because I saw it in the paper. A woman brought back some false hair to be exchanged--I sell false hair," said Ann, with a wan little smile and unconsciously touching her own hair--"and what she wanted exchanged--though we don't exchange it--was wrapped up in a newspaper, and as I looked down at it I happened to see your name. Wasn't that funny?"