hing on the borderland of the human. Then
he surveyed Katie anew and shut his lips together more tightly. It was
evidently just what he had expected his daughter to come to.

"And I came," said Katie, "to ask if you had any idea where she was."

That reached even farther into the border-country. He sat forward--his
lips relaxed. "Don't _you_ know?"

"No--I don't know. She was living with me, and she went away."

That recalled his own injury. He sat back and folded his arms. "She was
living with _me_--and she went away. No, I know nothing of her
whereabouts. My daughter saw fit to leave her father's house--under
circumstances that bowed his head in shame. She has not seen fit to
return, or to give information of her whereabouts. I have tried to serve
my God all my days," said the Reverend Saunders; "I do not know why this
should have been visited upon me. But His ways are inscrutable. His
purpose is not revealed."

"No," said Katie crisply, "I should say not."

He expressed his condemnation of the relation of manner to subject by a
compression of both eyes and lips. That, Katie supposed, was the way he
had looked when he told Ann her dog had been sent away.

"Did you ever wonder," she asked, with real curiosity, "how in the world
you happened to have such a daughter?"

"I have many times taken it up in prayer," was his response.

Katie sat there viewing him and looking above his head at the motto "God
Is Love." She wondered if Ann had had to work it.

It was the suggestion in the motto led her to ask: "Tell me, have you
really no idea, have you never had so much as a suspicion of why Ann
went away?"

"Who?" he asked sharply.

"Your daughter. Her friends call her Ann."

"Her name," said he uncompromisingly, "is Maria."

Katie smiled slightly. Maria, as he uttered it, squeaked distressingly.

"Be that as it may. But have you really no notion of why she went away?"

She was looking at him keenly. After a moment his eyes fell, or
rather, lifted under the look. "She had a good home--a God-fearing
home," he said.

But Katie did not let go her look. He had to come back to it, and he
shifted. Did he have it in him remotely, unavowedly, to suspect?

It would seem so, for he continued his argument, as if meeting
something. He repeated that she had a good home. He enumerated her
blessings.

But when he paused it was to find Katie looking at him in just the
same way. It forced him to an unwilling, uneasy: "Wha