“He can’t do that!  He can’t do that!”

It came quick and sharp.  Quick and sharp as fire answering attack.

She sat down.  The sharpness had gone and her voice was shaking as she said:  “You certainly must know, Ann, that he can’t do that.”

So they faced each other—­and the whole of it.  It was all opened up now.

“It’s very strange to me,” Katie added hotly, “that you wouldn’t know that.”

It seemed impossible for Ann to speak; the attack had been too quick and too sharp; evidently, too unexpected.

“I told him so,” she finally whispered.  “Told and told him so.  That you would feel—­this way.  That it—­couldn’t be.  He said no.  That you felt—­all differently—­after last summer.  And I thought so, too.  Your letters sounded that way.”

Katie covered her eyes for a second.  It was too much as if the things she was feeling differently about were the things she was losing.

“And when you want to be happy,” Ann went on, “it’s not so hard to persuade yourself—­be persuaded.”  She stopped with a sob.

“I know that,” was wrung wretchedly from Katie.

“And since—­since I have been happy—­let myself think it could be—­it just hasn’t seemed it could be any other way.  So I stopped thinking—­hadn’t been thinking—­took it for granted—­”

Again it wrung from Katie the this time unexpressed admission that there was nothing much easier than coming to look upon one’s happiness as the inevitable.

“And Wayne kept saying,” Ann went on, sobs back of her words, “that all human beings are entitled to work out their lives in their own way.  You believed that, he said.  And I—­I thought you did, too.  Your letters—­”

“No,” said Katie bitterly, “what I believed was that I was entitled to work out my life in my own way.  Wayne got his life mixed up with mine.”

The laugh which followed them was more bitter, more wretched than the words.

She had persuaded herself the more easily that she was entitled to work out her life in her own way because she had assumed Wayne would be there to stand guard over the things left from other days.  He was to stay there, fixed, leaving her free to go.

She could not have explained why it was that the things she had been thinking did not seem to apply to Wayne.

The thing grew to something monstrous.  There whirled through her mind a frenzied idea as to what they would do about sending Major Barrett a wedding announcement.

Other things whirled through her mind—­as jeers, jibes, they came, a laugh behind them.  A something somewhere was very commendable while it remained abstract!  Having a fine large understanding about Ann had nothing to do with having Ann for a sister-in-law!  “Calls” were less beautiful when responded to by one’s brother! This (and this tore an ugly wound) was what came of helping people in their quests for happiness.