“Well, rather!”

“And now there are all sorts of business things to straighten out.  It’s really very hard for Ann.”

“Perhaps we can help her,” he suggested.

“Perhaps we can,” agreed Kate.  Her eyes left him to wander across the shadows down to the river again.  But she came back to him to say, and this with the oddest smile of all, “Wouldn’t it be a queer sensation for us?  That thing of really ‘helping’ some one?”

She could not go to sleep that night.  For a long time she sat in her room in the same big chair in which Ann had sat that afternoon.  Poor Ann, who had sat there before she knew she was Ann, who was sleeping now without knowing she was Ann.  For Ann was indeed sleeping.  From her door as Kate carefully opened it had come the deep breathing as of an exhausted child.

Who was Ann?  Where had she come from?  How did she get there?  What had happened?  Why had she wanted to kill herself?

She wanted to know.  In truth, she was madly curious to know.  And probably she never would know.

And what would happen now?  It suddenly occurred to her that Wayne might be rather annoyed at having Ann commit suicide.  But there was a little catch in her laugh at the thought of Wayne’s consternation.

A long time she sat there wondering.  Where had Ann come from?  She had just seemed whirled out of the nowhere into the there, as an unannounced comet in well-ordered heavens Ann had come.  From what other world?—­and why?  Did she belong to anybody?  Another pleasant prospect for poor Wayne!  Was some one looking for Ann?  Would there be things in the paper about her?

Surely a girl could not step out of her life and leave no trail behind.  Things could not close up like that, even about Ann.  Every one had a place.  Then how could one step from that place without leaving a conspicuous looking vacancy?

Why had Ann been dressed that way?  It seemed a strange costume in which to kill one’s self.  It seemed to Katie that one would prefer to meet the unknown in a smaller hat.

She went to the closet and took out the organdie dress and satin slippers.  From whence? and why thither?  They opened long paths of wondering.  The dress was bedraggled about the bottom, as though trailed through fields and over roads.  And so strangely crumpled, and so strange the scent—­a scent hauntingly familiar, yet baffling in its relation to gowns.  A poorly made gown, Katie noted, but effective.  She tried to read the story, but could not read beyond the fact that there was a story.  The pink satin slippers had broken heels and were stained and soaked.  They had traveled ground never meant for them.  Something about Ann made one feel she was not the girl to be walking about in satin slippers.  Something had happened.  She had been dressed for one thing and then had done another thing.  Could it be that ever since the night before she had been out of her place in the scheme of things?—­loosened from the great human unit?—­seeking destruction, perhaps, because she could not regain her place therein?  “Where have you been?” Katie murmured to the ruined slippers.  “What did it?  What do you know?  What did you want?”