hair from her forehead it seemed she would push back the weight
of the years.

It was at that moment that Caroline Osborne, richest and most prominent
girl of the vicinity, stepped from her motor car.

Katie had met her a few nights before at the dance. And Wayne knew her
father--a man of many interests. It was his quarrel with the forest
service that had brought her cousin Fred Wayneworth there. Fred was not
one of his admirers.

"Isn't this heat distressing?" was her greeting, though she had succeeded
in keeping herself very fresh and sweet looking under the distress.

As Katie turned to introduce the two girls she saw that Ann was pulling
at her handkerchief nervously. Was it irritating to have people for whom
hot days were but hot days call heat distressing?

"Though one always has a breeze motoring," she took it up. "There are so
many ways in which automobiles make life more bearable, don't you find it
so, Miss Jones?"

Katie replied, inanely--Ann was still pulling at her handkerchief--that
they were indispensable, of course, though personally she was so fond of
horses--.

Yes, Miss Osborne loved horses too. Indeed it was army people had taught
her to ride; once when she visited at Fort Riley--she had spent a month
there with Mrs. Baxter. Katie knew her?

Oh, yes, Katie knew her, and almost all the rest of the army people whom
Miss Osborne told of adoring. Of a common world, they were not long
strangers. They came together through a whole network of associations.
Finally they reached South Carolina and concluded they must be
related--something about Katie's grandmother and Miss Osborne's
great-aunt--.

Katie, in the midst of her interest turning instinctively to include
Ann, was curiously arrested. Ann was sitting a little apart. And there
seemed so poignant a significance in her sitting apart. It was an order
of things from which she sat apart. The network went too far back, too
deep down; it was too intricate for either sympathy or ingenuity to
shape it at will.

Though Katie tried. For Katie, enough that she was sitting apart, and
consciously. Leaving grandmothers and great-aunts in a sadly unfinished
state she was lightly off into a story of something which had once
happened to her and Ann in Rome.

But Ann was as an actor refusing to play her part. Perhaps she was too
resentfully conscious of its being but a part--of her having no approach
save through a part. For the first time she failed in th