itterly.
"I don't suppose men who have been most burned to death ever say--'The
fire can't hurt you.'"

"And do they never try to rescue others from fires?" asked Katie
scornfully. "Do they let them burn--just because they know fire for a
dangerous thing?"

"Rescue them for what? More fires? It's a question whether it's very
sane, or so very humane, either, to rescue a man from one fire just to
have him on hand for another."

"I don't think I ever in my life heard anything more farfetched,"
pronounced Katie. "How do you know there'll be another?"

"Because there are people for whom there's nothing else. If you can't
offer a safe place, why rescue at all? Though it's true," he laughed,
"that I hadn't the courage of my convictions in the matter. After that
look--oh I haven't been able to make it live--burn--as it did--she passed
on the Island, the guard evidently thinking she was with some people who
had just got out of an automobile and gone on for a walk. And suddenly I
was corrupted, driven by that impulse for saving life, that beautiful
passion for keeping things alive to suffer which is so humorously
grounded in the human race."

He stopped with a little laugh. Watching him, Katie was thinking one need
have small fear of his not always being "corrupted." There was a light in
his eyes spoke for "corruption."

"I saw her making straight across the Island," he went back to his story.
"I _knew_. And I knew that on the other side she might find things very
conveniently arranged for her purpose. I turned the boat and went at its
best speed around the head of the Island. Hugged the shore on your side.
Pulled into a little cove. Waited."

He looked at Katie, comparing her with an _a priori_ idea of her. "I saw
you sitting up there in the sun--on the bunker. Just having received the
last will and testament, as it were, of this other human soul, can't you
fancy how I hated you--sitting there so serenely in the sun?"

"But why hate me?" she demanded passionately. "That's where you're small
and unjust! I don't make the crazed crowds, do I?"

"Yes; that's just what you do. There'd be no crowds if it weren't for
you. You take up too much room."

"I don't see why you want to--hurt me like that," she said unevenly.
"Don't you want me to enjoy my place any more? Will it do any good for me
to get in the crowd? What can I do about it?"

Looking into her passionately earnest face it was perhaps the gulf
between the girl an