Ann was speaking again, her voice stripped of the happy eagerness.  “Just as you say, Katie.  It is late, and perhaps I am—­too tired.”

That moved Katie.  That a girl should not be privileged to be insistent about going to a dance—­it seemed depriving her of her birthright.  And more cruel than taking away a birthright was bringing the consciousness of having no birthright.

Katie entered gayly into the plans.  They decided that Ann was to wear the rose-colored muslin—­the same gown she had worn that first night.  As she was fastening it for her Katie saw that Ann was smiling at herself in the mirror, giving herself little pats of approval here and there.

She had not done that the first time Katie helped her into that dress.

But it was the Ann of the first days who turned strained face to her in the dressing-room at the club-house.  All the girlish radiance—­girlish vanity—­was gone.  “Katie,” she whispered, “I think I’d better go home.  I—­I didn’t know it would be like this.  So many people—­so many lights—­and things.”

Gently Katie reassured her.  Ann needing her was the Ann she knew how to care for, and would care for in the face of all the people—­all the “lights—­and things.”  “You needn’t dance if you don’t want to,” she told her.  “I’ll tell Wayne to look out for you, that you’re really not able to meet people.  If I put him on guard he’ll go through fire and water for you.”

“Yes—­I know that,” said Ann, and seemed to take heart.

And for some time she did not dance.  From the floor Katie Would get glimpses of Ann and Wayne sauntering on the veranda on which the ball-room opened.  More than once she found Ann’s eyes following her—­Ann out in the shadow, looking in at the gay people in the light.

But with the opening of a lively two-step Captain Prescott insisted Ann dance with him.  “Oh come now,” he urged.  “Life’s too short to sit on the side lines.  This is a ripping two-step.”

The music, too, was urgent—­and persuasive.  As if without volition she fell into gliding little steps, moving toward the dancing floor.

It was Katie who watched that time.  She wanted to see Ann dancing.  At first it puzzled her; she was too graceful not to dance well, but she danced as if differently trained, as if unaccustomed to their way of dancing.  But as the two-step progressed she fell into the swing of it and seemed no different from the rest of the pretty, happy girls all about her.

She was radiant when she came back to them.  Like the golf, the dancing seemed to have given her confidence—­and confidence, happiness.

Though she still shrank from meeting people.  Katie fell in with a whole troop of college boys who hovered around her, as both college boys and their elders were wont to hover around Katie.  She wanted to bring some of them to Ann, but Ann demurred.  “Oh no, Katie.  I don’t want to dance with any strange men, please.  Just our own.”