"And when you want to be happy," Ann went on, "it's not so hard to persuade yourself--be persuaded." She stopped with a sob.

"I know that," was wrung wretchedly from Katie.

"And since--since I _have_ been happy--let myself think it could be--it just hasn't seemed it _could_ be any other way. So I stopped thinking--hadn't been thinking--took it for granted--"

Again it wrung from Katie the this time unexpressed admission that there was nothing much easier than coming to look upon one's happiness as the inevitable.

"And Wayne kept saying," Ann went on, sobs back of her words, "that all human beings are entitled to work out their lives in their own way. You believed that, he said. And I--I thought you did, too. Your letters--"

"No," said Katie bitterly, "what I believed was that _I_ was entitled to work out _my_ life in my own way. Wayne got his life mixed up with mine."

The laugh which followed them was more bitter, more wretched than the words.

She had persuaded herself the more easily that she was entitled to work out her life in her own way because she had assumed Wayne would be there to stand guard over the things left from other days. He was to stay there, fixed, leaving her free to go.

She could not have explained why it was that the things she had been thinking did not seem to apply to Wayne.

The thing grew to something monstrous. There whirled through her mind a frenzied idea as to what they would do about sending Major Barrett a wedding announcement.

Other things whirled through her mind--as jeers, jibes, they came, a laugh behind them. A something somewhere was very commendable while it remained abstract! Having a fine large understanding about Ann had nothing to do with having Ann for a sister-in-law! "Calls" were less beautiful when responded to by one's brother! _This_ (and this tore an ugly wound) was what came of helping people in their quests for happiness.

It was followed by a frantic longing to be with Mrs. Prescott--in the shelter of her philosophy, hugging tight those things left by the women of other days. Frightened, outraged, her impulse was to fly back to those well worn ways of yesterday.

But that was running away. Ann was there. Ann with the radiance gone; though, for just that moment, less stricken than defiant. There was something of the cunning of the desperate thing cornered in the sullen flash with which she said: "You talked a good deal about wanting me to be happy. Used to think I had a right to be. When it was Captain Prescott--"

It was unanswerable. The only answer Katie would be prepared to make to it was that she didn't believe, all things considered, it was a thing she would have said. But doubtless people lost nice shades of feeling when they became creatures at bay fighting for life.

And seemingly one would leave nothing unused. "I want you to know, Katie, that I paid back that money. The missionary money. You made me feel that it wasn't right. That I--that I ought to pay it back. I earned the money myself--some work there was for me to do at school. I wanted to--to buy a white dress with it." Ann was sobbing. "But I didn't. I sent back the money."

Katie was wildly disposed to laugh. She did not know why, after having worried about it so much, Ann's having paid back the missionary money should seem so irrelevant now. But she did not laugh, for Ann was looking at her as pleadingly, as appealingly, as Worth would have looked after he had been "bad" and was trying to redeem it by being "good."

With a sob, Ann hid her face against her muff.

Seeing her thus, Katie made cumbersome effort to drag things to less delicate, less difficult, ground.

"Ann dear," she began, "I--oh I'm _so_ sorry about this. But truly, Ann, you wouldn't be at all happy with Wayne."

Ann raised her face and looked at her with something that had a dull semblance to amusement.

"You see," Katie staggered on, "Wayne hasn't a happy temperament. He's morose. Queer. It wouldn't do at all, Ann, because it would make you both wretchedly unhappy."

She found Ann's faint smile irritating. "I ought to know," she added sharply, "for I've lived in the house with him most of my life."

"You may have lived in the house with him, Katie," gently came Ann's overwhelming response. "You've never understood him."

Katie openly gasped. But some of her anger passed swiftly into a wondering how much truth there might be in the preposterous statement.

Wayne as "immune" was another idea jeering at her now. And that further assumption, which had been there all the while, though only now consciously recognized, that Wayne's knowing Ann's story, made Ann, to Wayne, impossible--

Living in the same house with people did not seem to have a great deal to do with knowing their hearts.

"Wayne," Ann had resumed, in voice low and shaken with feeling, "has the sweetest nature of any one in this world. He's been unhappy just because he hadn't found happiness. If you could see him with me, Katie, I don't think you'd say he had an unhappy nature--or worry much about our not being happy."

Katie was silent, driven back; vanquished, less by the words than by the light they had brought to Ann's face.

And what she had been wanting--had thought she was ready to fight for--was happiness--for every one.

"Of course I know," Ann said, "that that's not it." That light had all gone from her face. It was twisted, as by something cruel, blighting, as she said just above a whisper: "There's no use pretending we don't know what it is."

She turned her face away, shielding it with her muff.

It was all there--right there between them--opened, live, throbbing. All that it had always meant--all that generations of thinking and feeling had left around it.

And to Katie, held hard, it was true, all too bitterly true, that she came of what Mrs. Prescott called a long line of fine and virtuous women. In her misery it seemed that the one thing one need have no fear about was losing the things they had left one.

But other things had been left her. The war virtues! The braving and the fighting and the bearing. Hardihood. Unflinchingness. Unwhimperingness.

Those things fought within her as she watched Ann shaken with the sobs she was trying to repress.

Well at least she would not play the coward's part with it! She brought herself to look it straight in the face. And what she saw was that if she could be brave enough to go herself into a more spacious country, leaving hurts behind, she must not be so cowardly, so ignobly inconsistent as to refuse the hurts coming to her through others who would dare. Through the conflict of many emotions, out of much misery, she at last wrenched from a sore heart the admission that Wayne had as much right to be "free" as she had. That if Ann had a right to happiness at all--and she had always granted her that--she had a right to this. It was only that now it was she who must pay a price for it. And perhaps some one always paid a price.

"Ann?"

Ann looked up into Katie's colorless, twitching face.

"I hope you and Wayne will be very happy." It came steadily, and with an attempted smile.

The next instant she was sobbing, but trying at the same time to tell Ann that sisters always acted that way when told of their brothers'

engagements.

CHAPTER XXXIX

She did not see her brother until evening. "Katie," he demanded sharply, "have you been disagreeable to Ann?"

She shook her head. "I haven't meant to be, Wayne."

Her face was so wretched that he grew contrite. "You're not pleased?"

"Why, Wayne, you can scarcely expect me to be--wholly pleased, can you?"

"But you always seemed to understand so well. I"--he paused in that constraint there so often was between them in things delicately intimate--"I've never told you, Katie, how fine I thought you were. So big about it."

"It's not so difficult," said Kate, with a touch of her old smile, "to be 'big' about people who aren't marrying into the family."

It seemed that he, too, was not above cornering her. "You know, Katie, it was your attitude in the beginning that--"