“Tell me of her, Katie,” urged her mother’s friend.  “Harry seems to think she means much to you.  Just what is it she means to you?”

For the moment she was desperate in her wondering how to tell it.  And then it happened that from her frenzied wondering what to say of it she sank into the deeper wondering what it was.  What it was—­what in truth it had been all the time—­Ann meant to her.

Why had she done it?  What was that thing less fleeting than fancy, more imperative than sympathy, made Ann mean more than things which had all her life meant most?

Watching Katie, Mrs. Prescott wavered between gratification and apprehension:  pleased that that light in Katie’s eyes, a finer light than she had ever known there before, should come through thought of this girl for whom Harry cared; troubled by the strangeness and the sternness of Katie’s face.

It was Katie herself Mrs. Prescott wanted—­had always wanted.  She had always hoped it would be that way, not only because she loved Katie, but because it seemed so as it should be.  She believed that summer would have brought it about had it not been for this other girl—­this stranger.

Katie’s embarrassment had fallen from her, pushed away by feeling.  She was scarcely conscious of Mrs. Prescott.

She was thinking of those paths of wondering, every path leading into other paths—­intricate, limitless.  She had been asleep.  Now she was awake.  It was through Ann it had come.  Perhaps more had come through Ann than was in Ann, but beneath all else, deeper even than that warm tenderness flowering from Ann’s need of her, was that tenderness of the awakened spirit—­a grateful song coming through an opening door.

It had so claimed her that she was startled at sound of Mrs. Prescott’s voice as she said, with a nervous little laugh:  “Why, Katie, you alarm me.  You make me feel she must be strange.”

“She is strange,” said Katie.

“Would you say, Katie,” she asked anxiously, “that she is the sort of girl to make my boy a good wife?”

Suddenly the idea of Ann’s making Harry Prescott any kind of wife came upon Katie as preposterous.  Not because she would be bringing him a “past,” but because she would bring gifts he would not know what to do with.

“I don’t think of Ann as the making some man a good wife type.  I think of Ann,” she tried to formulate it, “as having gone upon a quest, as being ever upon a quest.”

“A—­quest?” faltered Mrs. Prescott.  “For what?”

“Life,” said Katie, peering off into the darkness.

Mrs. Prescott was manifestly disturbed at the prospect of a daughter-in-law upon a quest.  “She sounds—­temperamental,” she said critically.

“Yes,” said Katie, laughing a little grimly, “she’s temperamental all right.”

They could not say more, as Ann and Wayne were coming toward them across the grass.

And almost immediately afterward the Osborne car again stopped before the house.  It was Mr. Osborne himself this time, bringing the Leonards, who had been dining with him.  They had stopped to see Mrs. Prescott.