's peace of mind.
They are marked danger as both warning and commendation. It is absolutely
guaranteed that one will not be so pleased with the world--and with one's
self--after reading them. There is more--both books and danger--where
they came from."

It was signed: "One who loves to lead adventurous souls into
dangerous paths."

It was two o'clock when Katie turned off her light that night.

CHAPTER XVI

Perhaps after all it was neither the dog nor the literature, but the
heat. For the heat of that next day was the kind to prey through
countries of make-believe. It oppressed every one, but Ann it seemed
to excite, as if it stirred memories in their sleep. "Don't fight
heat, Ann," Katie finally admonished, puzzled and disturbed by the way
Ann kept moving about. "The only way to get ahead of the heat is to
give up to it."

"Can you always do what you want to do?" Ann demanded with a touch of
petulance. "Isn't there ever something makes you do things you know
aren't the things to do?"

"Oh, dear me, yes," laughed Kate. "But you're simply your own worst enemy
when you try to get ahead of the heat."

"I don't know how you're going to help being your own worst enemy,"
Ann murmured.

She picked some leaves from the vines and threw them away, purposelessly;
she made the cat get out of a chair and sat down in it herself, only to
get up again and pile all the magazines in a different way, not
facilitating anything by the change. Then, after walking the length of
the veranda, she stood there looking at Katie: Katie in the coolest and
coolest-looking of summer dresses, leaning back in a cool-looking
chair--adjusting herself to things as they were, poised, victorious in
her submission.

Then Ann said a strange thing. "A hot day's just nothing but a hot day to
you, is it?"

The words themselves said less than the laugh which followed them--a
laugh which carried both envy and resentment, which at once admired and
accused, a laugh straight from the girl they were trying to ignore.

And pray what was a hot day to her, Katie wondered. What _was_ a hot
day--save a hot day? But as she watched Ann in the next few moments she
seemed to be surveying a figure oppressed less by heat than by that to
which the heat laid her open. It seemed that the hot day might stand for
the friction and the fretting of the world, for things which closed in
upon one as heat closed in, bore down as heat bore down. As Ann pushed
back the