She seemed to get the significance of Katie’s laugh, however, for it was as to a confederate she whispered:  “I’ll get caught!”

“Trust me,” said Kate, and laughed from a new angle.

Ann could laugh, too, and when Katie sat down to “talk it over” they were that most intimate of all things in the world, two girls with a secret, two girls set apart from all the world by that secret they held from all the world, hugging between them a beautiful, brilliant secret and laughing at the rest of the world because it couldn’t get in.  That secret, shared and recognized and laughed over and loved, did what no amount of sympathy or gratitude could have done.  It was as if the whole situation heaved a sigh of relief and settled itself in more comfortable position.

“Why no,” sparkled Kate, in response to Ann’s protestation, “the only thing you have to do is not to try.  Lovers of Italy must take their Italy with a superior calm.  And when you don’t know what to say—­just seem too full for utterance.  That being too full for utterance throws such a safe and lovely cover over the lack of utterance.  And if you fear you’re mixed up just look as though you were going to cry.  Wayne will be so terrified at that prospect that he’ll turn the conversation to air-ships, and you’ll always be safe with Wayne in an air-ship because he’ll do all the talking himself.”

Ann grew thoughtful.  She seemed to have turned back to something.  Katie would have given much to know what it was Ann’s deep brown eyes were surveying so somberly.

“The strange part of it is,” she said, “I used to dream of some such place.”

“Of course you did.  That’s why you belong there.  A great deal more than some of us who’ve tramped miles through galleries.”  Then swiftly Katie changed her position, her expression and the conversation.  “Elizabeth Barrett Browning is your favorite poet, isn’t she, Ann?”

“Why—­why no,” stammered Ann.  “I’m afraid I haven’t any favorite.  You see—­”

“So much the better.  Then you can take Elizabeth without being untrue to any one else.  She loved Florence.  You know she’s buried there.  I think you used to make pilgrimages to her tomb.”

Again Ann turned back, and at what she saw smiled a little, half bitterly, half wistfully.  “I’d like to have made pilgrimages somewhere.”

“To be sure you would.  That’s why you did.  The things we would like to have done, and would have done if we could, are lots more part of us than just the things we did do because we had to do them.  Just consider that all those things you’d like to have done are things you did.  It will make you feel at home with yourself.  And to-morrow we’ll go over the river and order Elizabeth Barrett Browning and a tailored suit.”

But with that the girl who would like to have done things receded, leaving baldly exposed the girl who had done the things she had had to do.  “No,” said Ann stubbornly and sullenly.