It was at that moment that Caroline Osborne, richest and most prominent girl of the vicinity, stepped from her motor car.

Katie had met her a few nights before at the dance.  And Wayne knew her father—­a man of many interests.  It was his quarrel with the forest service that had brought her cousin Fred Wayneworth there.  Fred was not one of his admirers.

“Isn’t this heat distressing?” was her greeting, though she had succeeded in keeping herself very fresh and sweet looking under the distress.

As Katie turned to introduce the two girls she saw that Ann was pulling at her handkerchief nervously.  Was it irritating to have people for whom hot days were but hot days call heat distressing?

“Though one always has a breeze motoring,” she took it up.  “There are so many ways in which automobiles make life more bearable, don’t you find it so, Miss Jones?”

Katie replied, inanely—­Ann was still pulling at her handkerchief—­that they were indispensable, of course, though personally she was so fond of horses—.

Yes, Miss Osborne loved horses too.  Indeed it was army people had taught her to ride; once when she visited at Fort Riley—­she had spent a month there with Mrs. Baxter.  Katie knew her?

Oh, yes, Katie knew her, and almost all the rest of the army people whom Miss Osborne told of adoring.  Of a common world, they were not long strangers.  They came together through a whole network of associations.  Finally they reached South Carolina and concluded they must be related—­something about Katie’s grandmother and Miss Osborne’s great-aunt—.

Katie, in the midst of her interest turning instinctively to include Ann, was curiously arrested.  Ann was sitting a little apart.  And there seemed so poignant a significance in her sitting apart.  It was an order of things from which she sat apart.  The network went too far back, too deep down; it was too intricate for either sympathy or ingenuity to shape it at will.

Though Katie tried.  For Katie, enough that she was sitting apart, and consciously.  Leaving grandmothers and great-aunts in a sadly unfinished state she was lightly off into a story of something which had once happened to her and Ann in Rome.

But Ann was as an actor refusing to play her part.  Perhaps she was too resentfully conscious of its being but a part—­of her having no approach save through a part.  For the first time she failed in that adaptability which had always made the stories plausible.  In the midst of her tale Katie met Ann’s eyes, and faltered.  They were mocking eyes.

As best she could she turned the conversation to local affairs, for Miss Osborne was looking curiously at Miss Jones’ unresponsive friend.

And as Ann for the first time seemed deliberately—­yes, maliciously to fail—­Katie for the first time felt out of patience, and injured.  Perhaps the heat was enervating, but was that sufficient reason for embarrassing one’s hostess?  Perhaps it did make her think of hard things, but was that any reason for failing in the things that made all this possible?  It was not appreciative, it was not kind, it did not show the right spirit, Katie told herself as she listened, with what she was pleased to consider both atoning and rebuking graciousness, to the plans for Miss Osborne’s garden party.