I know. And do you not see,
Katie, that that makes her about the biggest thing in life to me?"

Katie's heart almost stood still. She was staggered. Through her
wretchedness surged a momentary yearning to be one of those people--oh,
one of those _safe_ people--who never found the peep-holes in their
enclosure!

"Tell me of her, Katie," urged her mother's friend. "Harry seems to think
she means much to you. Just what is it she means to you?"

For the moment she was desperate in her wondering how to tell it. And
then it happened that from her frenzied wondering what to say of it she
sank into the deeper wondering what it _was_. What it was--what in truth
it had been all the time--Ann meant to her.

Why had she done it? What was that thing less fleeting than fancy, more
imperative than sympathy, made Ann mean more than things which had all
her life meant most?

Watching Katie, Mrs. Prescott wavered between gratification and
apprehension: pleased that that light in Katie's eyes, a finer light than
she had ever known there before, should come through thought of this
girl for whom Harry cared; troubled by the strangeness and the sternness
of Katie's face.

It was Katie herself Mrs. Prescott wanted--had always wanted. She had
always hoped it would be that way, not only because she loved Katie, but
because it seemed so as it should be. She believed that summer would have
brought it about had it not been for this other girl--this stranger.

Katie's embarrassment had fallen from her, pushed away by feeling. She
was scarcely conscious of Mrs. Prescott.

She was thinking of those paths of wondering, every path leading into
other paths--intricate, limitless. She had been asleep. Now she was
awake. It was through Ann it had come. Perhaps more had come through Ann
than was in Ann, but beneath all else, deeper even than that warm
tenderness flowering from Ann's need of her, was that tenderness of the
awakened spirit--a grateful song coming through an opening door.

It had so claimed her that she was startled at sound of Mrs. Prescott's
voice as she said, with a nervous little laugh: "Why, Katie, you alarm
me. You make me feel she must be strange."

"She is strange," said Katie.

"Would you say, Katie," she asked anxiously, "that she is the sort of
girl to make my boy a good wife?"

Suddenly the idea of Ann's making Harry Prescott any kind of wife
came upon Katie as preposterous. Not because she would be bringing
him a "