It was after she had succeeded in keeping him long enough for considerable headway to have been made in raft-construction that he exclaimed:  “Katie, will you do something for me?”

Her eyes were asking what there could be that she would not do for him.

“Then laugh, Katie.  Oh if you could know how I’ve longed to hear you laugh again.”

She did laugh, but a sob overtook the laugh.  Then laughed again and ran away from the sob.  But the laugh was sweeter for the sob.

“You will laugh, Katie, won’t you?” he asked with an anxiety that touched deep things.

“Why there’ll be days and days when I shan’t do anything else!” Then her laughing eyes grew serious.  “Though just a little differently, I think.  I’ve heard the world sobbing, you know.”

“But a world that is sobbing needs Katie’s laughing.”  He drew her to him with something not unlike a sob.  “I need it, I know.”

There was a wonderful sense of saving herself in knowing again that the world was sobbing.  What she could have borne no longer was drowning the world’s sobs in the world’s hollow laughter.

“Katie,” he cried, after more time had elapsed without finding either the astonishing stone or the astounding flower, “here’s a little sunny path!  I want you to walk in it.”

Laughingly he pushed her over into the narrow strip of sunshine, where there was just room for Katie’s feet.

But Katie shook her head.  “What do I care about sunny paths, if I must walk them alone?” And laughing, too, but with a deepening light in her eyes, she held out her hand to him.

But it was such a narrow sunny path; there was not room for two.

So Katie made room for him by stepping part way out of the sunshine herself.  Smiling, but eyes speaking for the depth of the meaning, she said:  “I’d rather be only half in the sunshine than be—­”

“Be what, Katie?” he whispered.

“Be without you.”

“Katie,” he asked passionately, “you mean that if walking together we can’t always be all in the sunshine—?”

“The thing that matters,” said Katie, “is walking together.”

“Over roads where there might be no sunshine?  Rough, steep roads, perhaps?”

“Whatever kind, of roads they may be,” said Katie, with the steadiness and the fervor of a devotee repeating a prayer.

They stood there as shadows lengthened across sunny paths, thinking of the years behind and the years ahead, now speaking of what they would do, now folded in exquisite silences.

And after the fashion of happy lovers who must hover around calamities averted, he exclaimed:  “Suppose Ann had never come!”

It sent her heart out in a great tenderness to Ann:  Ann, out in her mountains, and happy.  Nor was the tenderness less warm in the thought that Ann would join with Wayne and the others in deploring.  Ann, who was within now, would, Katie knew, grieve over her going without.