Is it coming back?" the girl asked.

"N--o; I think not; but I hope you will not go." Then, desperately
resolved to break through, she asked boldly: "Am I keeping you from
anything important?"

A strange gleam, compounded of things she did not understand, shot out at
her. To be followed with: "Important? Oh I don't know. That depends on
how you look at it. The only thing I have left to do is to kill myself.
I guess it won't take long."

Kate met it with a sharp, involuntary cry. For the sullen steadiness,
dispassionateness, detachment with which it was said made it more real
than it had been at the water's edge.

"But--but you see it's such a lovely day. You know--you know it's such a
beautiful place," was what the resourceful Miss Jones found herself
stammering.

"Yes," agreed her companion, "pleasant weather, isn't it?" She looked at
Katie contemptuously. "You think _weather_ makes any difference? That's
like a girl like you!"

Katie laughed. Laughing seemed the only sand club she had just then. "I
_am_ a fool," she agreed. "I've often thought so myself. But like most
other fools I mean well, and this just didn't seem to me the sort of day
when it would occur to one to kill one's self. Now if it were terribly
hot, the kind of hot that takes your brains away, or so cold you were
freezing, or even if it were raining, not a decent rain, but that
insulting drizzle that makes you hate everything--why then, yes, I might
understand. But to kill one's self in the sunshine!"

As she was finishing she had a strange sensation. She saw that the girl
was looking at her compassionately. Katherine Wayneworth Jones was not
accustomed to being viewed with compassion.

"It would be foolish to try to make you understand," said the girl
simply, finality in her weariness. "It would be foolish to try to make a
girl like you understand that nothing can be so bad as sunshine."

Katie leaned across the table. This interested her. "Why I suppose that
might be true. I suppose--"

But the girl was not listening. She was leaning back in the great wicker
chair. She seemed actually to be relaxing, resting. That seemed strange
to Kate. How could she be resting in an hour which had just been tacked
on to her life? And then it came to her that perhaps it was a long time
since the girl had sat in a chair like that. If she had had a chance,
when things were going badly, to sit in such a chair and rest, might the
river have seemed a less desi