After a moment’s consideration she approached the man who looked newest to his profession and asked how many churches there were in Centralia.  Thereupon one man beat open retreat and all viewed her with suspicion.  But the man of her choice was a brave man and ventured to guess that there were four.

One of his comrades held that there were five.  A discussion ensued closing with the consensus of opinion in favor of the greater number.

Then Katie explained her predicament; she wanted to find a man who was a minister in Centralia and she didn’t know his name.  Reassured, they gathered round interestedly.  Was he young or old?  Katie cautiously placed him in the forties or fifties.  Then they guessed and reckoned that it couldn’t be either the Reverend Lewis or that new fellow at the Baptist.  Was he—­would she say he was one to be kind of easy on a fellow, or did she think he took his religion pretty hard?

Katie was forced to admit that she feared he took it hard.  With that they were agreed to a man that it must be the Reverend Saunders.

She was thereupon directed to the residence of the Reverend Saunders.  Right down there was a restaurant with a sign in the window “Don’t Pass By.”  But she was to pass by.  Then there was the church said “Welcome.”  No, that was not the Reverend Saunders’ church.  It was the church where she turned to the right.  She could turn to the left, but, on the whole, it would be better to turn to the right—­It would all have been quite simple had it not been for the fullness of the directions.

She took it that the fullness of their directions was in proportion to the emptiness of their lives.

As she walked slowly along she appreciated what Ann had said of the town’s being walled in by nothingness—­the people walled in by nothingness.  Her two blocks on “Main Street” showed her Centralia as a place of petty righteousness and petty vice.  There was nothing so large and flexible as the real joys of either righteousness or unrighteousness.

Nor was Centralia picturesquely desolate.  It had not that quality of hopelessness which lures to melancholy.  New houses were going up.  The last straw was that Centralia was “growing.”

And it was on those streets that a lonely little girl with deep brown eyes and soft brown hair had dreamed of a Something Somewhere.

As she turned in at the residence of the Reverend Saunders Katie was newly certain that Ann had not come back to Centralia.  It seemed the one disappointment in Ann she was not prepared to bear would be to find that she had returned to the home of her youth.

Katie had been shown into the parlor.  She was sitting in a rocking chair which “squeaked”—­her smartly shod foot resting on a pale blue rose—­the pale blue rose being in the carpet.  The carpet also squeaked—­or the papers underneath it did.  On the table beside her was a large and ornate Bible, an equally splendid album, and something called “Stepping Heavenward.”