she turned
back to the bright room--crowded, colorful, moving room which seemed set
in the vast, soft night.

Her brother was just passing--her brother and her friend Ann Forrest.
They did not look out at her. They did not seem to know that Katie was
near. She had never seen Ann's face so beautiful. It had that beauty
she had all the while seen as possible for it, only more intense, more
exalted than she had been able to foresee it. The music stopped on a
sob. Every one was still for an instant--then they were applauding for
more. Ann was not clapping. Katie had never seen anything as beautiful
as that look of rapt loveliness on Ann's face as she stood there
waiting. She might have been the very spirit of love waiting in the
mists at the heart of the night. As softly the music began again and
Wayne once more guided her in and out among those boys and girls--boys
and girls for whom life had meant little more than laughing and
dancing--Katie had a piercing vision of the girl with her hands over her
face stumbling on toward the river.

They were all very quiet on the way home.

That night just as she was falling asleep Katie was startled. It seemed
at first she was being awakened by a sharp dart, one of those darts of
apprehension seemed shot into her approaching slumber. But it was nothing
more than Wayne whistling out on the porch, whistling the dreaming waltz
which would bear one to the love waiting at the heart of the night.

But Katie was sleepy now. How did Wayne expect any one to go to sleep,
she thought crossly, whistling at that time of night.

But across the hall was another girl who listened. She had not been
asleep. She had been lying there looking out into the night, very wide
awake. And when she heard the whistling she too sat up in bed, swaying
ever so gently to the rhythm of it, inarticulately following it under her
breath and smiling a hushed, tender little smile. Something lovely seemed
stealing over her. But in the wake of it was something else--something
cold, blighting. Before he had finished she had covered her ears with her
hands, and was sobbing.

CHAPTER XV

As she looked back afterward upon that span of days, searching them,
translating, Katie saw that the day of the golf and the dancing marked
the farthest advance.

After that it was as if Ann, frightened at finding herself so far out in
the open, shrank back into the shadows. But having gone a little way into
the open she was n