down toward
the river. It might have been the moonlight made her look so strange as
she said, with a smile of the same quality as those shadows on the grass:
"Why yes; in fact, Ann's fondness for the water was the first thing I
ever noticed about her. I think I might even say it was the water drew us
together."

"Oh, well then, that is great. We can take the boat and do all sorts of
jolly things. Now I wonder--about a horse for her. She rides?"

"Perhaps you had better make no plans for Ann," she suddenly advised. "It
really would not surprise me at all if she went away to-morrow. There is
a great deal of uncertainty about the whole thing. In fact, Ann has had a
great deal of trouble."

"I'm sorry," he said with a simplicity she liked in him.

"Yes, a great deal of trouble. Last year both her father and mother died,
which was a great blow to her."

"Well, rather!"

"And now there are all sorts of business things to straighten out. It's
really very hard for Ann."

"Perhaps we can help her," he suggested.

"Perhaps we can," agreed Kate. Her eyes left him to wander across the
shadows down to the river again. But she came back to him to say, and
this with the oddest smile of all, "Wouldn't it be a queer sensation for
us? That thing of really 'helping' some one?"

She could not go to sleep that night. For a long time she sat in her room
in the same big chair in which Ann had sat that afternoon. Poor Ann, who
had sat there before she knew she was Ann, who was sleeping now without
knowing she was Ann. For Ann was indeed sleeping. From her door as Kate
carefully opened it had come the deep breathing as of an exhausted child.

Who was Ann? Where had she come from? How did she get there? What had
happened? Why had she wanted to kill herself?

She wanted to know. In truth, she was madly curious to know. And
probably she never would know.

And what would happen now? It suddenly occurred to her that Wayne might
be rather annoyed at having Ann commit suicide. But there was a little
catch in her laugh at the thought of Wayne's consternation.

A long time she sat there wondering. Where _had_ Ann come from? She had
just seemed whirled out of the nowhere into the there, as an unannounced
comet in well-ordered heavens Ann had come. From what other world?--and
why? Did she belong to anybody? Another pleasant prospect for poor
Wayne! Was some one looking for Ann? Would there be things in the paper
about her?

Surely a gir