Ann's
lips, perhaps thinking of just how cordially Katie would hate her.

"And then after a while you left this town?" Katie suggested as Ann
seemed held there by something.

"Yes, after a while I left." And that held her again.

"I was fifteen when I--freed Tono from life," she emerged from it. "It
was five years later that you--stopped me from freeing myself. Lots of
things were crowded into those five years, Katie--or rather into the last
three of them. I had to be treated worse than Tono was treated before it
came to me that I had better be as kind to myself as I had been to my
dog. Only I," Ann laughed, "didn't have anybody to give me a last hour!"

"But you see it wasn't a last hour, after all," soothed Katie. "Only the
last hour of the old hard things. Things that can never come back."

"Can't they come back, Katie? Can't they?"

Katie shook her head with decision. "Do you think I'd let them come
back? Why I'd shut the door in their face!"

"Sometimes," said Ann, "it seems to me they're lying in wait for me. That
they're going to spring out. That this is a dream. That there isn't any
Katie Jones. Some nights I've been afraid to go to sleep. Afraid of
waking to find it a dream. There's an awful dream I dream sometimes! The
dream is that this is a dream."

"Poor dear," murmured Katie. "It will be more real now that we've
talked."

"I used to dream a dream, Katie, and I think it was about you. Only you
weren't any one thing. You were all kinds of different things. Lovely
things. You were Something Somewhere. You were the something that was way
off beyond the nothingness of Centralia."

"The something that didn't squeak," suggested Katie tremulously.

"Something Somewhere. You were both a waking and a sleeping dream. I knew
you were there. Isn't it queer how we do--know without knowing? My father
used to talk about people being 'called.' Called to the ministry--called
to the missionary field--called to heaven. Well maybe you're called to
other things, too. Maybe," said Ann with a laugh which sobbed, "you're
even 'called' to Chicago."

The laugh died and the sob lingered. "Only when you get there--Chicago
doesn't seem to know that it had called you.

"My Something Somewhere was always something I never could catch up
with. Sometimes it was a beautiful country--where a river wound through a
woods. Sometimes it was beautiful people laughing and dancing. Sometimes
it was a star. Sometimes it was a field of