"But why not, Aunt Kate?"--squirming as the puppy placed a long warm lick right below the knee.

"Oh, I don't know." The story was getting better. Then, looking up with Kate's queer smile: "It might hurt their feelings."

"Why would it--?"

"Oh, Wayneworth Jones! Why were you born with your brain cells screwed into question marks?--and _why_ do I have to go through life getting them unscrewed?"

She actually read a paragraph; and as there she had to turn a page she looked over at Ann. Ann's puppy had joined Worth's on the floor and together they were indulging in bites of puppyish delight at the little boy's legs, at each other's tails, at so much of the earth's atmosphere as came within range of their newly created jaws craving the exercise of their function. Mad with the joy of living were those two collie pups on that essentially live and joyous morning.

And Ann, if not mad with the joy of living, seemed sensible of the wonder of it. "Days in Florence" open on her lap, hands loose upon it, she was looking off at the river. From hard thoughts of other days Kate could see her drawn to that day--its softness and sunshine, its breath of the river and breath of the trees. Folded in the arms of that day was Ann just then. The breeze stirred a little wisp of hair on her temple--gently swayed the knot of ribbon at her throat. The spring was wooing Ann; her face softened as she listened. Was it something of that same force which bounded boisterously up in boy and dogs which was stealing over Ann--softening, healing, claiming?

The next paragraph of the story on the printed page was less interesting.

"Aunt Kate," said Worth, gathering both puppies into his arms as they were succeeding all too well in demonstrating that they were going to grow up and be real dogs, "Watts says it is the ungodliest thing he knows of that these puppies haven't got any names."

"I am glad to learn," murmured Kate, "that Watts is a true son of the church. He yearns for a christening?"

"He says that being as nobody else has thought up names for them, he calls the one that is most yellow, Mike; and the one that is most white, Pat. Do you think Mike and Pat are pretty names, Aunt Kate?"

"Well, I can't say that my esthetic sense fairly swoons with delight at sound of Mike and Pat," she laughed.

"I'll tell you, Worthie," she suggested, looking up with twinkling eye after her young nephew had been experimenting with various intonations of Mike--Pat, Pat--Mike, "why don't you call one of them _Pourquoi_?"

He walked right into it with the never-failing "Why?"

"Just so. Call one _Pourquoi_ and the other _N'est-ce-pas_. They do good team work in both the spirit and the letter. _Pourquoi_, Worth, is your favorite word in French. Need I add that it means 'why'? And _N'est-ce-pas_--well, Watts would say _N'est-ce-pas_ meant 'ain't it'?

and more flexible translators find it to mean anything they are seeking to persuade you is true. Pourquoi is the inquirer and N'est-ce-pas the universalist. I trust Watts will give this his endorsement."

"I'll ask him," gravely replied Worth, and sought to accustom the puppies to their new names with chanting--Poor Qua--Nessa Pa. The chant grew so melancholy that the puppies subsided; oppressed, overpowered, perhaps, with the sense of being anything as large and terrible as inquirer and universalist.

But Worth was too true a son of the army to leave a brooding damsel long alone in the corner. "You seen the new cow?" was his friendly approach.

"Why, I don't believe I have," she confessed.

"I s'pose you've seen the chickens?" he asked, a trifle condescendingly.

Ann shamefacedly confessed that she had not as yet seen the chickens.

He took a step backward for the weighty, crushing: "Well, you've seen the _horses_, haven't you?"

"Aunt Kate--Aunt Kate!" he called peremptorily, as Ann humbly shook her head, "Miss Ann's not seen the cow--or the, chickens--nor the horses!"

"Isn't it scandalous?" agreed Kate. "It shows what sort of hostess I am, doesn't it? But you see, Worth, I thought as long as you were coming so soon you could do the honors of the stables. I think it's always a little more satisfactory to have a man do those things."

"I'll take you now," announced Worth, in manner which brooked neither delay nor gratitude.

And so the girl and the little boy and the two puppies, the joy of motion freeing them from the sad weight of inquirer and universalist, started across the lawn for the stables. Pourquoi caught at Ann's dress and she had to be manfully rescued by Worth. And no sooner had the inquirer been loosened from one side than the universalist was firmly fastened to the other and the rescue must be enacted all over again, amid considerable confusion and laughter. Ann's laugh was borne to Katie on a wave of the spring--just the laugh of a girl playing with a boy and his dogs.

It was a whole hour later, and as Kate was starting out for golf she saw Ann and Worth sitting on the sandpile, a tired inquirer and very weary universalist asleep at their feet. Ann was picking sand up in her hands and letting it sift through. Worth was digging with masculine vigor. Kate passed close enough to hear Ann's, "Well, once upon a time--"

Ann!--opening to a little child the door of that wondrous country of Once upon a Time! No mother had ever done it more sweetly, with more tender zeal, more loving understanding of the joys and necessities of Once upon a Time. Some once upon a time notions of Kate's were quite overturned by that "once upon a time" voice of Ann's. Then the once upon a time of the sandpile did not shut them out--they who had known another once upon a time? Did it perhaps love to take them in, knowing that upon the sands of this once upon a time the other could keep no foothold?

"Once upon a Time--Once upon a Time"--it kept singing itself in her ears.

For her, too, it opened a door.

CHAPTER IX

Having conquered the son, Katie that evening set vigorously about for the conquest of the father.

"The trouble is," she turned it over in giving a few minutes to her own toilet for dinner, after having given many minutes to Ann's, "that there's simply no telling about Wayne. He is just the most provokingly uncertain man now living."

And yet it was not a formidable looking man she found in the library a few minutes before the dinner hour. He was poring over some pictures of Panama in one of the weeklies, sufficiently deep in them to permit Katie to sit there for the moment pondering methods of attack. But instead of outlining her campaign she found herself concluding, what she had concluded many times before, that Wayne was very good-looking. "Not handsome, like Harry Prescott," she granted, "but Wayne seems the product of something--the result of things to be desired. He hasn't a new look."

"Katherine is going to give us more trouble than Wayne ever will," their mother had sighed after one of those escapades which made life more colorful than restful during Katie's childhood. To which Major Jones replied that while Kate might give them more trouble, he thought it probable Wayne would give himself the more. Certain it had been from the first that if Wayne could help it no one would know what trouble he might be giving himself.

Old-fashioned folk who expected brothers and sisters to be alike had, on the surface at least, a sorry time with Wayneworth and Katherine Jones.

Katie was sunny. Katie had a genius for play. She laughed and danced up and down the highways and the byways of life and she had such a joyous time about it that it had not yet occurred to any one to expect her to help pay the fiddler. Just watching Katie dance would seem pay enough for any reasonable fiddler. Katie laughed a great deal, and was smiling most of the time; she seemed always to have things in her thoughts to make smiles. Wayne laughed little and some of his smiles made one understand how the cat felt about having its fur rubbed the wrong way.

Their friend Major Darrett once said: "When I meet Katie I have a fancy she has just come from a jolly dip in the ocean; that she lay on the sands in the sun and kicked up her heels longer than she had any business to, and now she's flying along to keep the most enchanting engagement she ever had in all her life. She's smiling to herself to think how bad she was to lie in the sand so long, and she's not at all concerned, because she knows her friends will be so happy to see her that they'll forget to scold her for being late. Katie's spoiled," the Major concluded, "but we like her that way."

Of Wayne this same friend remarked: "Wayne's a hard nut to crack."

Many army people felt that way. In fact, Wayne was a nut the army itself had not quite cracked. Some army people maintained that Wayne was disagreeable. But that may have been because he was not just like all other army people. He did not seem to have grasped the idea that being "army" set him apart. Sometimes he made the mistake of judging army affairs by ordinary standards. That was when they got some idea of how the cat felt. And of all cats an army cat would most resent having its fur rubbed in any but the prescribed direction.

Katie, continuing her ruminations about Wayne as the product of things, had come to see that with it all he was detached from those desirable things which had produced him. One knew that Wayne had traditions, yet he was not tradition fettered; he suggested ancestors without being ancestor conscious. Was it the gun--as Wayne the Worthy persisted in calling it--and the gun's predecessors--for Wayne always had something--made him so distinctly more than the mere result of things which had formed him?

"It is the gun," Katie decided, taking him in with half shut eyes as a portrait painter might. "Had the same ancestors myself, and yet I'm both less and more of them than he is. What I need's a gun! Then I'd stand out of the background better, too." Then with one of Katie's queer twists of fancy--Ann! Might not Ann be her gun? Perhaps she had been wanting a gun for a long time without knowing what it was she was wanting when surely wanting something. Perhaps every one felt the gun need to make them less the product and more the person.

Then there was another thing. The thing that had traced those lines about Wayne's mouth, and had whitened, a little, the brown hair of his temples.

Wayne had cared for Clara. Heaven only knew how he could--Katie's thoughts ran on. Perhaps heaven did understand those things--certainly it was too much for mere earth. Why Wayne, about whom there had always seemed a certain brooding bigness, certainly a certain rare indifference, should have fallen so absurdly in love with the most vain and selfish and vapid girl that ever wrecked a post was more than Katie could make out.

And it had been her painful experience to watch Wayne's disappointment develop, watch that happiness which had so mellowed him recede as day by day Clara fretted and pouted and showed plainly enough that to her love was just a convenient thing which might impel one's husband to get one a new set of furs. She remembered so well one evening she had been in Clara's room when Wayne came in after having been away since early morning. So eager and tender was Wayne's face as he approached Clara, who was looking over an advertising circular. There was a light in his eyes which it would seem would have made Clara forget all about advertising circulars. But before he had said a word, but stood there, loving her with that look--and it would have to be admitted Clara did look lovely, in one of the _neglige_ affairs she affected so much--she said, with a babyish little whine she evidently thought alluring: "I just don't see, Wayne, why we can't have a new rug for the reception room. We can certainly afford things as well as the Mitchells." And Wayne had just stood there, with a smile which closed the gates and said, with an irony not lost upon Katie, at least: "Why I fancy we can have a new rug, if that is the thing most essential to our happiness." Clara had cried: "Oh Wayne--you _dear_!" and twittered and fluttered around, but the twittering and fluttering did not bring that light back to Wayne's face.

He went over to the far side of the room and began reading the paper, and that grim little understanding smile--a smile at himself--made Katie yearn to go over and wind her arms about his neck--dear strange Wayne who had believed there was so much, and found so little, and who was so alive to the bitter humor of being drawn to the heart of things only to be pushed back to the outer rim. But Katie knew it was not her arms could do any good, and so she had left the room, not clear-eyed, Clara still twittering about the kind of rug she would have. And day by day she had watched Wayne go back to the outer circle, that grim little smile as mile-stones in his progress.

But he was folding his paper; it was growing too near the hour to speculate longer on Wayne and his past.

"Wayne?" she began.

He looked up, smiling at the beseeching tone. "Yes? What is it, Katie?

Just what brand of boredom are you planning to inflict?"

"You can be _so_ nice, Wayne--when you want to be."

"'Um--hum. A none too subtle way of calling a man a brute."

"I presume there are times when you can't help being a brute, Wayne; but I do hope to-night will not be one of them."

"Why it must be something very horrible indeed, that you must approach with all this flaunting of diplomacy."