wretchedly unhappy."

She found Ann's faint smile irritating. "I ought to know," she added
sharply, "for I've lived in the house with him most of my life."

"You may have lived in the house with him, Katie," gently came Ann's
overwhelming response. "You've never understood him."

Katie openly gasped. But some of her anger passed swiftly into a
wondering how much truth there might be in the preposterous statement.
Wayne as "immune" was another idea jeering at her now. And that further
assumption, which had been there all the while, though only now
consciously recognized, that Wayne's knowing Ann's story, made Ann, to
Wayne, impossible--

Living in the same house with people did not seem to have a great deal to
do with knowing their hearts.

"Wayne," Ann had resumed, in voice low and shaken with feeling, "has the
sweetest nature of any one in this world. He's been unhappy just because
he hadn't found happiness. If you could see him with me, Katie, I don't
think you'd say he had an unhappy nature--or worry much about our not
being happy."

Katie was silent, driven back; vanquished, less by the words than by the
light they had brought to Ann's face.

And what she had been wanting--had thought she was ready to fight
for--was happiness--for every one.

"Of course I know," Ann said, "that that's not it." That light had all
gone from her face. It was twisted, as by something cruel, blighting, as
she said just above a whisper: "There's no use pretending we don't know
what it is."

She turned her face away, shielding it with her muff.

It was all there--right there between them--opened, live, throbbing. All
that it had always meant--all that generations of thinking and feeling
had left around it.

And to Katie, held hard, it was true, all too bitterly true, that she
came of what Mrs. Prescott called a long line of fine and virtuous
women. In her misery it seemed that the one thing one need have no fear
about was losing the things they had left one.

But other things had been left her. The war virtues! The braving and the
fighting and the bearing. Hardihood. Unflinchingness. Unwhimperingness.

Those things fought within her as she watched Ann shaken with the sobs
she was trying to repress.

Well at least she would not play the coward's part with it! She brought
herself to look it straight in the face. And what she saw was that if
she could be brave enough to go herself into a more spacious country,
leaving hurt