Worth there requested the privilege of whispering in his Aunt Kate’s ear.  The ear being proffered, he poured into it:  “I guess the man that mends the boats has got some dangerous literature, Aunt Kate.”

“Tell him to endanger Aunt Kate,” she whispered back.

“Do you suppose there is any way, Wayne,” she began, after a moment of seeming to have a very good time all to herself, “of getting back the money we spent for my so-called education?”

“It would considerably enrich us,” grimly observed Wayne.

“When doctors or lawyers don’t do things right can’t you sue them and get your money back?  Why can’t you do the same thing with educators?  I’m going to enter suit against Miss Sisson.  This unchristian editor says modern education is dangerous; but there was no danger in the course at Miss Sisson’s.  I want my money back.”

“That you may invest it in dangerous literature?” laughed Wayne.

After he had gone Ann was standing at the window, looking down toward the river.  Suddenly she turned passionately upon Katie.  “If you had ever had anything to do with danger—­you might not be so anxious to find it.”

She was trembling, and seemed close to tears.  Katie felt it no time to explain herself.

And when she spoke again the tears were in her voice.  “I can’t tell you—­when I begin to talk about it—­” The tears were in her eyes, too, then, and upon her cheeks.  “You see—­I can’t—­But, Katie—­I want you to be safe.  I want you to be safe.  You don’t know what it means—­to be safe.”

With that she passed swiftly from her room.

Katie sat brooding over it for some time.  “If you’ve been in danger,” she concluded, “you think it beautiful to be ‘safe.’  But if you’ve never been anything but ’safe’—­” Her smile finished that.

But Katie was more in earnest than her manner of treating herself might indicate.  To be safe seemed to mean being shielded from life.  She had always been shielded from life.  And now she was beginning to feel that that same shielding had kept her from knowledge of life, understanding of it.  Katie was disturbingly conscious of a great deal going on around her that she knew nothing about.  Ann wished her to be ‘safe’; yet it was Ann who had brought a dissatisfaction with that very safety.  It was Ann had stirred the vague feeling that perhaps the greatest danger of all was in being too safe.

Katie felt an acute humiliation in the idea that she might be living in a dangerous age and knowing nothing of the danger.  She would rather brave it than be ignorant of it.  Indeed braving it was just what she was keen for.  But she could not brave it until she found it.

She would find it.

But the next afternoon she went over to the city with Ann and found nothing more dangerous than a forlorn little stray dog.

It was evident that he had never belonged to anybody.  It was written all over his thin, squirming little yellow body that he was Nobody’s dog—­written just as plainly as the name of Somebody’s dog would be written on a name-plate on a collar.