“They didn’t.  They said I was wicked.  They said the Evil One had entered into me.  They said I must pray God to forgive me for having killed one of his creatures!  Me—!

“Of course it ended in Bible verses.  Is it so strange I loathed the Bible?  And every morning I had to hear myself prayed for as a wicked girl who would harm one of God’s creatures.  The Almighty was implored not to send me to Hell.  ‘Send me there if you want to,’ I’d say to myself on my knees, ‘Tono’s not in Hell, anyway.’”

Ann laughed bitterly.  “So that’s why I’m a sacrilegious, blasphemous person who doesn’t care much about hearing about God.  I associate Him with thin lips that shut together tight-and people who make long prayers and break little dogs’ hearts—­and with boots—­and souls—­that squeak.  I can’t think of one single thing I ever heard about Him that made me like Him.”

“Oh, Ann dear!” protested Katie shudderingly.

“Try not to think such things.  Try not to feel that way.  You haven’t heard everything there is to hear about God.  You haven’t heard any of it in the right way.”

“Perhaps not.  I only know what I have heard.”  And Ann’s face was too white and hard for Katie to say more.

“And your mother, dear?  Where was she all this time?  Didn’t she love you—­and help?”

“She died when I was twelve.  She’d like to have loved me.  She did some on the sly—­in a scared kind of way.”

Katie sat there contemplating the picture of Ann’s father and mother and Ann—­Ann, as child of that union.

“I think she died because life frightened her so.  In a year my father married again. She isn’t afraid of anything.  She’s a God-fearing, exemplary woman.  And she always looks to see if you have any mud on your shoes.”

After a moment Ann said quietly:  “I hate her.”

“So would I,” said Katie, and it brought the ghost of a smile to Ann’s lips, perhaps thinking of just how cordially Katie would hate her.

“And then after a while you left this town?” Katie suggested as Ann seemed held there by something.

“Yes, after a while I left.”  And that held her again.

“I was fifteen when I—­freed Tono from life,” she emerged from it.  “It was five years later that you—­stopped me from freeing myself.  Lots of things were crowded into those five years, Katie—­or rather into the last three of them.  I had to be treated worse than Tono was treated before it came to me that I had better be as kind to myself as I had been to my dog.  Only I,” Ann laughed, “didn’t have anybody to give me a last hour!”

“But you see it wasn’t a last hour, after all,” soothed Katie.  “Only the last hour of the old hard things.  Things that can never come back.”

“Can’t they come back, Katie?  Can’t they?”

Katie shook her head with decision.  “Do you think I’d let them come back?  Why I’d shut the door in their face!”