Heaven and earth were not so easily moved.

Katie had tried, and the man who mended the boats had tried, and Wayne, but to no avail.

There had come the one letter from her—­letter seeking to save “Ann” for Katie.  It was a key to Ann, but no key to her whereabouts save that it was postmarked Chicago.

Those last three months had impressed Katie with the tragic indefiniteness of the Chicago postmark.

She had spent the greater part of the summer there, at a quiet little hotel on the North Side, where she was nominally one of a party of army women.  That was the olive branch to her Aunt Elizabeth on the chaperone question.  For her own part, she had seen too many unchaperoned girls in Chicago that summer to care whether she was chaperoned or not.

Her army friends thought Katie interested in some work which she did not care to talk about.  They thought it interesting, though foolhardy to let it bring those lines.  Katie was not a beauty, they said among themselves, and could not afford lines.  Her charm had always been her freshness, her buoyancy and her blitheness.  Now if she lost that—­

Wayne had been there from time to time.  It was but a few hours’ ride from the Arsenal, and his detail to his individual work gave him considerable liberty.

He, too, had more “lines” in September than he had had in June.  That they attributed to his “strenuousness” in his work, and thought it to be deplored.  After all, the department might throw him down—­who knew what it might not do?—­and then what would have been the use?  For a man who did not have to live on his pay, Captain Jones was looked upon as unnecessarily serious.

But Katie suspected that it was not alone devotion to military science had traced those lines.  It surprised her a little that they should have come, but to Katie herself it was so vital and so tragic a thing that it was not difficult to accept the fact of its marking any one who came close to it.  After that night at the dance there had several times stirred a vague uneasiness, calling out the thought that it was a good thing Wayne was, as she loosely thought it, immune.  But even that uneasiness was lost now in sterner things.

She had never gone into her reasons for looking upon her brother as “immune.”  It was an idea fixed in her mind by her association with his unhappiness with Clara.  Knowing how much he had given, she thought of him as having given all.  Her sense of the depth of his hurt had unanalyzed associations with finality, associations intrenched by Wayne’s growing “queerness.”

It could not be said, however, that that queerness had stood in the way of his doing all he could.  Some of the best suggestions had come from him.  And Katie had reasons for suspecting he had done some searching of his own which he did not report to her.

She knew that he was worried about her, though he understood too well to ask her to give up and turn back to her own life.