branch to her Aunt Elizabeth on the chaperone
question. For her own part, she had seen too many unchaperoned girls in
Chicago that summer to care whether she was chaperoned or not.

Her army friends thought Katie interested in some work which she did not
care to talk about. They thought it interesting, though foolhardy to let
it bring those lines. Katie was not a beauty, they said among themselves,
and could not afford lines. Her charm had always been her freshness, her
buoyancy and her blitheness. Now if she lost that--

Wayne had been there from time to time. It was but a few hours' ride
from the Arsenal, and his detail to his individual work gave him
considerable liberty.

He, too, had more "lines" in September than he had had in June. That they
attributed to his "strenuousness" in his work, and thought it to be
deplored. After all, the department might throw him down--who knew what
it might not do?--and then what would have been the use? For a man who
did not have to live on his pay, Captain Jones was looked upon as
unnecessarily serious.

But Katie suspected that it was not alone devotion to military science
had traced those lines. It surprised her a little that they should have
come, but to Katie herself it was so vital and so tragic a thing that it
was not difficult to accept the fact of its marking any one who came
close to it. After that night at the dance there had several times
stirred a vague uneasiness, calling out the thought that it was a good
thing Wayne was, as she loosely thought it, immune. But even that
uneasiness was lost now in sterner things.

She had never gone into her reasons for looking upon her brother as
"immune." It was an idea fixed in her mind by her association with his
unhappiness with Clara. Knowing how much he had given, she thought of him
as having given all. Her sense of the depth of his hurt had unanalyzed
associations with finality, associations intrenched by Wayne's growing
"queerness."

It could not be said, however, that that queerness had stood in the way
of his doing all he could. Some of the best suggestions had come from
him. And Katie had reasons for suspecting he had done some searching of
his own which he did not report to her.

She knew that he was worried about her, though he understood too well to
ask her to give up and turn back to her own life.

Her gratitude to Wayne for that very understanding made her regret the
more her inability to be frank with him a