It was followed by a frantic longing to be with Mrs. Prescott—­in the shelter of her philosophy, hugging tight those things left by the women of other days.  Frightened, outraged, her impulse was to fly back to those well worn ways of yesterday.

But that was running away.  Ann was there.  Ann with the radiance gone; though, for just that moment, less stricken than defiant.  There was something of the cunning of the desperate thing cornered in the sullen flash with which she said:  “You talked a good deal about wanting me to be happy.  Used to think I had a right to be.  When it was Captain Prescott—­”

It was unanswerable.  The only answer Katie would be prepared to make to it was that she didn’t believe, all things considered, it was a thing she would have said.  But doubtless people lost nice shades of feeling when they became creatures at bay fighting for life.

And seemingly one would leave nothing unused.  “I want you to know, Katie, that I paid back that money.  The missionary money.  You made me feel that it wasn’t right.  That I—­that I ought to pay it back.  I earned the money myself—­some work there was for me to do at school.  I wanted to—­to buy a white dress with it.”  Ann was sobbing.  “But I didn’t.  I sent back the money.”

Katie was wildly disposed to laugh.  She did not know why, after having worried about it so much, Ann’s having paid back the missionary money should seem so irrelevant now.  But she did not laugh, for Ann was looking at her as pleadingly, as appealingly, as Worth would have looked after he had been “bad” and was trying to redeem it by being “good.”

With a sob, Ann hid her face against her muff.

Seeing her thus, Katie made cumbersome effort to drag things to less delicate, less difficult, ground.

“Ann dear,” she began, “I—­oh I’m so sorry about this.  But truly, Ann, you wouldn’t be at all happy with Wayne.”

Ann raised her face and looked at her with something that had a dull semblance to amusement.

“You see,” Katie staggered on, “Wayne hasn’t a happy temperament.  He’s morose.  Queer.  It wouldn’t do at all, Ann, because it would make you both wretchedly unhappy.”

She found Ann’s faint smile irritating.  “I ought to know,” she added sharply, “for I’ve lived in the house with him most of my life.”

“You may have lived in the house with him, Katie,” gently came Ann’s overwhelming response.  “You’ve never understood him.”

Katie openly gasped.  But some of her anger passed swiftly into a wondering how much truth there might be in the preposterous statement.  Wayne as “immune” was another idea jeering at her now.  And that further assumption, which had been there all the while, though only now consciously recognized, that Wayne’s knowing Ann’s story, made Ann, to Wayne, impossible—­

Living in the same house with people did not seem to have a great deal to do with knowing their hearts.