sad."

"I don't think of her as particularly quiet," he replied; "and sad isn't
it, either. I think of her"--he paused and concluded uncertainly--"as a
girl in a dream."

"Her dream or your dream, Wayne?" laughed Katie, just to turn it.

She was throwing sticks for the puppies and missed his startled look.

But it was Katie who was startled when he said, still uncertainly, and
more to himself than to Katie: "Though she's so real."

Ann and Captain Prescott were coming toward them. She had never looked
less like a girl in a dream. Laughing and jesting with her companion, she
looked simply like an exceedingly pretty girl having a very good time.

"But you like Ann, don't you, Wayne?" Katie asked anxiously.

"Yes," said Wayne, "I like her."

She came running up the steps to them, flushed, happy, as free from
self-consciousness as Worth would have been. "Katie," she cried, "I
played the last one in four. Didn't I?" turning proudly to the Captain
for endorsement.

Both men were looking at her with pleasure: cheeks flushed, eyes
glowing, hair a little disheveled and a little damp about the forehead,
panting a little, her lithe, beautiful body swaying gently, hands
outstretched to show Wayne how she had hardened her palms, Ann had never
seemed so lovely and so live. In that moment it mattered not whether one
knew anything about the earning capacity of her father or the culinary
abilities of her mother. _She_ was real. Real as sunshine and breezes
and birds are real, as Worth and the puppies tumbling over each other on
the grass were real, as all that is life-loving is real. And not
detached, not mistily floating, but moored to that very love of life,
capacity for life, to that look she had awakened in the faces of the men
to whom she was talking. It seemed a paltry thing just then to wonder
whether Ann was child of farmer, or clothing merchant, or great artist.
She was Life's child. Love's child. Love's child--only she had not
dwelt all her days in her father's house. But it was her father's house;
that was why, once warmed and comforted, she could radiantly take her
place. Watching her as she was going over her game for Wayne,
demonstrating some of her strokes, and her slim, beautiful body made
even the poor strokes wonderful things, Katie was not speculating on
whether Ann had come from Chicago, or Florence, or Big Creek. She was
thinking that Ann was product, expression, of the love of the world,
that love which