She spent the next day at the Juvenile Court, and came home with the conviction that there ought to be no more children until all those now wandering the hard ways of the world were cared for.  She was in no mood for sweethearting, yet she looked with some covert anxiety at the mail-box.  There was an envelope addressed to her, but the superscription was not in Ray’s handwriting.  The Colorado stamp gave her a hint of whom it might have come from, and ridiculously she felt her heart quickening.  Yet why should Karl Wander write to her?  She made herself walk slowly up the stairs, and insisted that her hat and gloves and jacket should be put scrupulously in their places before she opened her letter.  It proved not to be a letter, after all, but only a number of photographs, taken evidently by the sender, who gave no word of himself.  He let the snow-capped solitary peaks utter his meanings for him.  The pictures were beautiful and, in some indescribable way, sad—­cold and isolate.  Kate ran her fingers into the envelope again and again, but she could discover no note there.  Neither was there any name, save her own on the cover.

“At least,” said Kate testily, “I might have been told whom to thank.”

But she knew whom to thank—­and she knew with equal positiveness that she would send no thanks.  For the gift had been a challenge.  It seemed to say:  “I dare you to open communication with me.  I dare you to break the conscious silence between us!”

Kate did not lift the glove that had been thrown down.  She hid the photographs in her clock and told no one about them.

At the close of the third day a note came from Ray.  Her line, he said, had followed him to Lake Forest and he had only then found time to answer it.  He was seeing old friends and was very much occupied with business and with pleasure, but he hoped to see her before long.  Kate laughed aloud at the rebuff.  It was, she thought, a sort of Silvertree method of putting her in her place.  But she was sorry, too,—­sorry for his hurt; sorry, indefinitely and indescribably, for something missed.  If it had been Karl Wander whom she had treated like that he would have waited on her doorstep till she came, and if he had felt himself entitled to a quarrel, he would have “had it out” before men and the high gods.

At least, so she imagined he would have done; but upon consideration there were few persons in the world about whom she knew less than about Karl Wander.  It seemed as if Honora were actually perverse in the way she avoided his name.

XIV

The spring was coming.  Signs of it showed at the park edges, where the high willow hedges began to give forth shoots of yellowish-green; at times the lake was opalescent and the sky had moments of tenderness and warmth.  Even through the pavement one seemed to scent the earth; and the flower shops set up their out-of-door booths and solicited the passer-by with blossoms.