As the Captain was looking at Ann and not seeming overpowered with amazement, looking, on the other hand, as though seeing something rarely good to look at, Katie had the courage to look too. And at what she saw her heart swelled quite as the heart of the mother swells when the child speaks his piece unstutteringly. Ann was _doing_ it!--rising to the occasion--meeting the situation. Then she had other qualities no less valuable than looking Florentine. That thing of _doing_ it was a thing that had always commanded the affectionate admiration of Katie Jones.

It was not what Ann did so much as her effective manner of doing nothing.

One would not say she lacked assurance; one would put it the other way--that she seemed shy. It seemed to Katie she looked for all the world like a startled bird, and it also seemed that Captain Prescott particularly admired startled birds.

He turned and rode a little way beside them, he and Katie assuming conversational responsibilities. But Ann's smile warmed her aloofness, and her very shyness seemed well adjusted to her fragility. "And just fits in with what I told him!" gloated Kate. And though she said so little, for some reason, perhaps because she looked so different, one got the impression of her having said something unusual. She had a way of listening which conveyed the impression she could say things worth listening to--if she chose. One took her on faith.

He said to her at the last, with that direct boyish smile it seemed could not frighten even a startled bird: "You think you are going to like it here?" And Ann replied, slowly, a tremor in her voice, and a child's earnestness and sweetness in it too: "I think it the most beautiful place I ever saw in all my life."

At the simple enough words his face softened strangely. It was with an odd gentleness he said he hoped they could all have some good times together.

But, the moment conquered, things which it had called up swept in. The whole of it seemed to rush in upon her.

She turned harshly upon Katie. "This is--ridiculous! I'm going away to-night!"

"We will talk it over this evening," replied Kate quietly. "You will wait for that, won't you? I have something to suggest. And in the end you will be at liberty to do exactly as you think best. Certainly there can be no question as to that."

On their way home they encountered the throng of men from the shops--dirty, greasy, alien. It was not pleasant--meeting the men when one was driving. And yet, though certainly distasteful, they interested Katie, perhaps just because they were so different. She wondered how they lived and what they talked about.

Chancing to look at Ann, she saw that stranger than the men was the look with which Ann regarded them. She could not make it out. But one thing she did see--the soft spring breezes had much yet to do.

CHAPTER VII

Wayne had gone over to Colonel Leonard's for bridge. Kate was to have gone too, but had pleaded fatigue. The plea was not wholly hollow. The last thirty hours had not been restful ones.

And now she was to go upstairs and do something which she did not know how to do, or why she was doing. Sitting there alone in the library she grew serious in the thought that a game was something more than a game when played with human beings.

Not that seriousness robbed her of the charm that was her own. The distinctive thing about Katie was that there always seemed a certain light about her, upon her, coming from her. Usually it was as iridescent lights dancing upon the water; but to-night it was more as one light, a more steady, deeper light. It made her gray eyes almost black; made her clear-cut nose and chin seem more finely chiseled than they actually were, and brought out both the strength and the tenderness of her not very small mouth. Katie's friends, when pinned down to it, always admitted with some little surprise that she was not pretty; they made amends for that, however, in saying that she just missed being beautiful.

"But that's not what you think of when you see her," they would tell you.

"You think, 'What a good sort! She must be great fun!'" And there were some few who would add: "Katie is the kind you would expect to find doing splendid service in that last ditch."

Yet even those few were not familiar with the Katie Jones of that moment, for it was a new Katie, less new when leaning forward, tense, puzzled, hand clenched, brow knitted, her whole well-knit, athletic body at attention than when leaning back--lax, open to new and awesome things.

And as though she must come back where she felt acquainted with herself, she suddenly began to whistle. Katie found whistling a convenient and pleasant recepticle for excess emotion. She had enjoyed it when a little girl because she had been told it was unladylike; kept it up to find out if it were really true that it would spoil her mouth, and now liked doing it because she could do it so successfully.

She was still whistling herself back to familiar things as she ran lightly up the stairs; had warmed to a long final trill as she stood in the doorway. The girl looked up in amazement. She had been sitting there, elbows on her knees, face in her hands. It was hard to see what might have been seen in her face because at that moment the chief thing seen was astonishment. Katie slipped down among the pillows of the couch, an arm curled about her head. "Didn't know I could do that, did you?" she laughed. "Oh yes, I have several accomplishments. Whistling is perhaps the chiefest thereof. Then next I think would come golf. My game's not bad. Then there are a few wizardy things I do with a chafing dish, and lastly, and after all lastly should be firstly, is my genius for getting everything and everybody into a most hopeless mess."

The girl moved impatiently at first, as if determined not to be evaded by that light mood, but sight of Katie, lying there so much as a child would lie, seemed to suggest how truly Katie might have spoken and she was betrayed into the shadow of a smile.

"I suppose there has never been a human being as gifted in balling things up as I am," meditatively boasted Kate.

"Now here you are," she continued plaintively. "You want to go away.

Well, of course, that's your affair. Why should you have to stay here--if you don't want to? But in the twenty-four hours you've been here I presume I've told twenty-four unnecessary lies to my brother. And if you do go away--as I admit you have a perfect right to do--it will put me in such a compromising position, because of those deathless lies that will trail me round through life that--oh, well," she concluded petulantly, "I suppose I'll just have to go away too."

But the girl put it resolutely from her. A wave of sternness swept her face as she said, with a certain dignity that made Katie draw herself to a position more adapted to the contemplation of serious things: "That's all very well. Your pretending--trying to pretend--that I would be doing you a favor in staying. It is so--so clever. I mean so cleverly kind. But I can't help seeing through it, and I'm not going to accept hospitality I've no right to--stay here under false pretenses--pretend to be what I'm not--why what I couldn't even pretend to be!" she concluded with bitterness.

Katie was leaning forward, all keen interest. "But do you know, I think you could. I honestly believe we could put it through! And don't you see that it would be the most fascinating--altogether jolliest sort of thing for us to try? It would be a game--a lark--the very best kind of sport!"

She saw in an instant that she had wounded her. "I'm sorry; I would like very much to do something for you after all this. But I am afraid this is sport I cannot furnish you. I am not--I'm not feeling just like--a lark."

"Now do you _see_?" Kate demanded with turbulent gesture. "Talk about balling things _up_! I like you; I want you to stay; and when I come in here and try and induce you to stay what do I do but muddle things so that you'll probably walk right out of the house! Why was I born like that?" she demanded in righteous resentment.

"'Katherine,' a worldly-wise aunt of mine said to me once, 'you have two grave faults. One is telling the truth. The other is telling lies. I have never known you to fail in telling the one when it was a time to tell the other.' Can't you see what a curse it is to mix times that way?"

As one too tired to resist the tide, not accepting, but going with it for the minute because the tide was kindly and the force to withstand it small, the girl, her arm upon the table, her head leaning wearily upon her hand, sat there looking at Katie, that combination of the non-accepting and the unresisting which weariness can breed.

Kate seemed in profound thought. "Of course, you would naturally be suspicious of me," she broke in as if merely continuing the thinking aloud; Katie's fashion of doing that often made commonplace things seem very intimate--a statement to which considerable masculine testimony could be affixed. "I don't blame you in the least. I'd be suspicious, too, in your place. It's not unnatural that, not knowing me well, you should think I had some designs about 'doing good,' or helping you, and of course nothing makes self-respecting persons so furious as the thought that some one may be trying to do them good. Now if I could only prove to you, as could be proved, that I never did any good in my life, then perhaps you'd have more belief in me, or less suspicion of me. I wonder if you would do this? Could you bring yourself to stay just long enough to see that I am not trying to do you good? Fancy how I should feel to have you go away looking upon me as an officious philanthropist! Isn't it only square to give me a chance to demonstrate the honor of my worthlessness?"

Still the girl just drifted, her eyes now revealing a certain half-amused, half-affectionate tenderness for the tide which would bear her so craftily.

"And speaking of honor, moves me to my usual truth-telling blunder, and I can't resist telling you that in one respect I really have designs on you. But be at peace--it has nothing to do with your soul. Never having so much as discovered my own soul, I should scarcely presume to undertake the management of yours, but what I do want to do is to feed you eggs!

"No--now don't take it that way. You're thinking of eggs one orders at a hotel, or--or a boarding-house, maybe. But did you ever eat the eggs that were triumphantly announced by the darlingest bantam--?"

She paused--beaten back by the things gathering in the girl's face.

"Tell me the truth!" it broke. "What are you doing this for? What have you to _gain_ by it?"

"I hadn't thought just what I had to--gain by it," Katie stammered, at a loss before so fierce an intensity. "Does--must one always 'gain'

something?"

"If you knew the world," the girl threw out at her, "you'd know well enough one always expects to gain something! But you don't know the world--that's plain."

Katie was humbly silent. She had thought she knew the world. She had lived in the Philippines and Japan and all over Europe and America. She would have said that the difference between her and this other girl was in just that thing of her knowing the world--being of it. But there seemed nothing to say when Ann told her so emphatically that she did not know the world.

The girl seemed on fire. "No, of course not; you don't know the world--you don't know life--that's why you don't know what an unheard-of thing you're doing! What do you know about _me_?" she thrust at her fiercely. "What do you _think_ about me?"

"I think you have had a hard time," Katie murmured, thinking to herself that one must have had hard time--

"And what's that to you? Why's that your affair?"

"It's not exactly my affair, to be sure," Katie admitted; "except that we seem to have been--thrown together, and, as I said, there's something about you that I've--taken a fancy to."

It drew her, but she beat it back. Resistance made her face the more stern as she went on: "Do you think I'm going to impose on you--just because you know so little? Why with all your cleverness, you're just a baby--when it comes to life! Shall I tell you what life is like?" Her gaze narrowed and grew hard. "Life is everybody fighting for something--and knocking down everybody in their way. Life is people who are strong kicking people who are weak out of their road--then going on with a laugh--a laugh loud enough to drown the groans. Life is lying and scheming to get what you want. Life is not caring--giving up--getting hardened--I know it. I _loathe_ it."

Katie sat there quite still. She was frightened.

"And you! Here in a place like this--what do you know about it? Why you're nothing but an--outsider!"

An outsider, was she?--and she had thought that Ann--

The girl's passion seemed suddenly to flow into one long, cunning look.

"What are you doing it for?" she asked quietly with a sort of insolently indifferent suspicion.

"I don't know," Katie replied simply. "At least until a minute ago I didn't know, and now I wonder if perhaps, without knowing it, I was not trying to make up for some of those people--for I fear some of them were friends of mine--who have gone ahead by kicking other people out of their way. Perhaps their kicks provided my laughs. Perhaps, unconsciously, it--bothered me."

Passion had burned to helplessness, the appealing helplessness of the weary child. She sat there, hands loosely clasped in her lap, looking at Katie with great solemn eyes, tired wistful mouth. And it seemed to Kate that she was looking, not at her, but at life, that life which had cast her out, looking, not with rage now, but with a hurt reproachfulness in which there was a heartbreaking longing.