Oh no—­Ann had not come back.  She knew that before she asked.

Ann’s father was a tall, thin man with small gray eyes.  “Thin lips that shut together tight”—­she recalled that.  And the kind of beard that is unalterably associated with self-righteousness.

It was clear he did not know what to make of Katie.  She was wearing a linen suit which had vague suggestions of the world, the flesh, and the devil.  She had selected it that morning with considerable care.  Likewise the shoes!  And the angle of the quill in Katie’s hat stirred in him the same suspicion and aggression which his beard stirred in her.

Thus viewing each other across seas of prejudice, separated, as it were, by all the experiences of the human race, they began to speak of Ann and of life.

“I am a friend of your daughter’s,” was Katie’s opening.

It startled him, stirring something on the borderland of the human.  Then he surveyed Katie anew and shut his lips together more tightly.  It was evidently just what he had expected his daughter to come to.

“And I came,” said Katie, “to ask if you had any idea where she was.”

That reached even farther into the border-country.  He sat forward—­his lips relaxed.  “Don’t you know?”

“No—­I don’t know.  She was living with me, and she went away.”

That recalled his own injury.  He sat back and folded his arms.  “She was living with me—­and she went away.  No, I know nothing of her whereabouts.  My daughter saw fit to leave her father’s house—­under circumstances that bowed his head in shame.  She has not seen fit to return, or to give information of her whereabouts.  I have tried to serve my God all my days,” said the Reverend Saunders; “I do not know why this should have been visited upon me.  But His ways are inscrutable.  His purpose is not revealed.”

“No,” said Katie crisply, “I should say not.”

He expressed his condemnation of the relation of manner to subject by a compression of both eyes and lips.  That, Katie supposed, was the way he had looked when he told Ann her dog had been sent away.

“Did you ever wonder,” she asked, with real curiosity, “how in the world you happened to have such a daughter?”

“I have many times taken it up in prayer,” was his response.

Katie sat there viewing him and looking above his head at the motto “God Is Love.”  She wondered if Ann had had to work it.

It was the suggestion in the motto led her to ask:  “Tell me, have you really no idea, have you never had so much as a suspicion of why Ann went away?”

“Who?” he asked sharply.

“Your daughter.  Her friends call her Ann.”

“Her name,” said he uncompromisingly, “is Maria.”

Katie smiled slightly.  Maria, as he uttered it, squeaked distressingly.

“Be that as it may.  But have you really no notion of why she went away?”