orth--"put your book away. Don't lose it; it makes
them cross to have you lose them. And another principle of modern finance
with which I am heartily in sympathy is that money should be kept in
circulation. It encourages embezzlement to leave it in banks too long."
Then, seeing what was gathering, she said quietly but authoritatively:
"Leave it unsaid, Ann. Can't we always just leave it unsaid? Nothing
makes me so uncomfortable as to feel I'm constantly in danger of having
something nice said to me."

Perhaps Katie knew that countries of make-believe are sensitive things,
that it does not do to admit you know them for that.

There had been that one time when the hand of reality reached savagely
into the dream, as if the things the girl had run away from had come to
claim her. It seemed through that long night that they had claimed her,
that Ann's "vacation" was over.

Captain Prescott had been dining with them that night and after dinner
they were sitting out on the porch. He was humming a snatch of something.
Katie heard a chair scrape and saw that Ann had moved farther into the
shadow. She was all in shadow save her hand; that Katie could see was
gripping the arm of her chair.

He turned to Ann. "Did you see 'Daisey-Maisey'?"

"Ann wasn't here then," said Kate.

"Did you see it, Katie?"

"No."

"It was a jolly, joyous sort of thing," he laughed. "Sort of thing to
make you feel nothing matters. That was the name of that thing I was
humming. No, not 'Nothing Matters,' but 'Don't You Care.' And there were
the 'Don't You Care' girls--pink dresses and big black hats. They seemed
to mean what they sang. They didn't care, certainly."

It was Wayne who spoke. "Think not?"

Ann came a little way out of the shadow. She had leaned toward Wayne.

"Well you'd never know it if they did," laughed Prescott. He turned to
Wayne. "What's your theory?"

"Oh I have no theory. Just a wondering. Can't see how girls who have
their living to earn could sing 'Don't You Care' with complete abandon."

Ann leaned forward, looking at him tensely. Then, as if afraid, she
sank back into shadow. Katie could still see her hand gripping the arm
of her chair.

"But they're not the caring sort," Prescott was holding.

"Think not?" said Wayne again, in Wayne's queer way.

There was a silence, and then Ann had murmured something and
slipped away.

Katie followed her; for hours she sat by her bed, holding her hand,
trying to soothe her