He helped her back to the bed; smoothed her pillow; covered her with the miserable spread.

Ann hid her face in the pillow, sobbing.

He pulled up the one chair the room afforded, laid his hand upon her hair, and waited.  His face was white, his lips trembling.

“It’s all over now,” he murmured at last.  “It’s all over now.”

She shook her head and sobbed afresh.

His heart grew cold.  What did she mean?  A fear more awful than any which had ever presented itself shot through him.  But she raised her head and as she looked at him he knew that whatever she meant it was not that.

“What is it about Katie?” she whispered.

“Why, Ann, can’t you guess what it is about Katie?  Didn’t you know what Katie must suffer in your leaving like that?”

“I left so she wouldn’t have to suffer.”

“Well you were all wrong, Ann.  You have caused us—­” But as, looking into her face, he saw what she had suffered, he was silenced.

She was feverish; her eyes were large and deep and perilously bright, her temples and cheeks cruelly thin.  But what hurt him most were not the marks of illness and weakness.  It was the harassed look.  Fear.

Fear—­that thing so invaluable in building character.

Thought of the needlessness of it wrung from him:  “Ann—­how could you!”

“Why I thought I was doing right,” she murmured.  “I thought I was being kind.”

He smiled faintly, sadly, at the irony and the bitter pity of that.

“But how could you think that?” he pressed.  “Not that it matters now—­but I don’t see how you could.”

She looked at him strangely.  “Do you—­know?”

He nodded.

“Then don’t you see?  I left to make it easy for Katie.”

He thought of Katie’s summer.  “Well your success in that direction was not brilliant,” he said with his old dryness.

Her eyes looked so hurt that he stroked her hand reassuringly, as he would have stroked Worth’s had he hurt him.  And as he touched her—­it was a hot hand he touched—­it struck him as absurd to be quibbling about why she had gone.  She was there.  He had found her.  That was all that mattered.

He became more and more conscious of how much it mattered.  He wanted to draw her to him and tell her how much it mattered.  But he did not—­dared not.

“And how did you happen to be so unkind as to call me up, Ann?” he asked with a faint smile.

“I wanted—­I wanted to hear about Katie.  And I wanted”—­her eyes had filled, her chin was trembling—­“I was lonesome.  I wanted to hear your voice.”

His heart leaped.  For the moment he was not able to keep the tenderness from his look.

“And I knew you were there because I saw it in the paper.  A woman brought back some false hair to be exchanged—­I sell false hair,” said Ann, with a wan little smile and unconsciously touching her own hair—­“and what she wanted exchanged—­though we don’t exchange it—­was wrapped up in a newspaper, and as I looked down at it I happened to see your name.  Wasn’t that funny?”