Finally she wrote:  “My friend Ann Forrest is with us now.  I am hoping to be able to keep her for some time.  Poor dear, she has not been well and has had much sorrow—­such a story!—­and I think the peace of things here—­peace you know, uncle, being poetic rendition of stupidity—­is just what Ann needs.”

A robin on a lilac bush entered passionate protest against the word stupidity.  “What will you have?  What will you have?” trilled the robin in joyous frenzy.

Wise robin!  After all, what would one have?  And when within the world of May that robins love one was finding a whole undiscovered country to explore?

“No, I don’t mean that about stupidity,” she wrote after a wide look and a deep breath.  “It does seem peace.  Peace that makes some other things seem stupidity.  I must be tired, for you will be saying, dear uncle, that a yearning for peace has never been one of the most conspicuous of my attributes.”

There she fell to nibbling again, looking over at the girl in the deep garden chair in the choice corner of the big porch.  “My friend Ann Forrest!” Katie murmured, smiling strangely.

Her friend Ann Forrest was turning the leaves of a book, “Days in Florence,” which Kate had left carelessly upon the arm of the chair she commended to Ann.  It was after watching her covertly for sometime that Katie set down, a little elf dancing in her eye, yet something of the seer in that very eye in which the elf danced: 

“Of course you have heard me tell of Ann, the girl to whom I was so devoted in Italy.  I should think, uncle, that you of the cloth would find Ann a most interesting subject.  Not that she’s of your flock.  Her mother was a passionate Catholic.  Her father a relentless atheist.  He wrote a famous attack on the church which Ann tells me hastened her mother’s death.  The conflict shows curiously in Ann.  When we were together in Florence a restlessness would many times come upon her.  She would say, ‘You go on home, Katie, without me.  I have things to attend to.’  I came to know what it meant.  Once I followed her and saw her go to the church and literally fling herself into its arms in a passion of surrender.  And that night she sat up until daybreak reading her father’s books.  You see what I mean?  A wealth of feeling—­but always pulled two ways.  It has left its mark upon her.”

She read it over, gloated over it, and destroyed it.  “Uncle would be coming on the next train,” she saw.  “He’d hold Ann up for a copy of the attack!  And why this mad passion of mine for destruction?  Should a man walking on a tight-rope yield to every playful little desire to chase butterflies?”