And what she saw was that some one, something, had, as it were, struck a blow at the center, and the girl, the something that really was her, had gone to pieces.  Everything was scattered.  Even her features scarcely seemed to belong to each other, so how must it not be with those other things, inner things, oh, things one did not know what to call?  Was it because she could not get things together it seemed to her she must make them all stop?  Was that it?  Did people lose the power to hold themselves in the one that made you you?

What could do that?  Something that reached the center; not many things could; something, perhaps, that kept battering at it for a long time, and just shook it at first, and then—­

It was too dreadful to think of it that way.  She tried to make herself stop.

The girl’s face was turned to the out-of-doors; to a great tree in front of the window, a tree in which some robins had built their nests.  Such a tired face!  So many tear marks, and so much less reachable than tear stains.

A beautiful face, too.  If all were back which the blow at the center had struck away, if she had all of her—­if lighted—­it would be a rarely beautiful face.

The girl was like a flower; a flower, it seemed to Kate, which had not been planted in the right place.  The gardener had been unwise in his selection of a place for this flower; perhaps he had not used the right kind of soil, perhaps he had put it in the full heat of the sun when it was a flower to have more shade; perhaps too much wind or too much rain—­Katie wondered just what the mistake had been.  For the flower would have been so lovely had the gardener not made those mistakes.

Even now, it was lovely:  lovely with a saddening loveliness, for one saw at a glance how easily a breeze too rough could beat it down.  And one knew there had been those breezes.  Every petal drooped.

A strange desire entered the heart of Katherine:  a desire to see whether those petals could take their curves again, whether a color which blunders had faded could come back to its own.  She was like the new gardener eager to see whether he can redeem the mistakes of the old.  And the new gardener’s zeal is not all for the flower; some of it is to show what he can do, and much of it the true gardener’s passion for experiment.  Katie Jones would have made a good gardener.

And yet it was something less cold than the experimenting instinct tightened her throat as she looked at the frail figure of the girl for whom life had been too much.

“I must go now,” she was saying, with what seemed mighty effort to summon all of herself over which she could get command.  “You are all right now.  I must go.”

But she sank back in the chair, as if that one thing left at the center pulled her back, crying out that if it could but have a little more time there—­

The girl in blue linen was sitting at the feet of the girl in pink organdie.  She had hold of her hand, so slim a hand.  Everything about the girl was slim, built for favoring breezes.