sn't know the situation, and has any thought of
marrying her--why I'm in honor bound to tell him."

That fired her. "Oh you are, are you? Well if your honor moves you to
that I'll have a few things to say about that same 'honor' of yours! To
our distinguished guest of this evening, for instance," she laughed.

He lost color, but quickly recovered himself. "Oh come now, Katie, you
and I are not going to quarrel."

"No, not if you can help it. That wouldn't be your way. But do you know
what I think of the 'game' you play?"

She had gone a little way up the stairs, and was standing looking back at
him. Her eyes were shining feverishly.

"I think it's a game for cheats."

He did go colorless at that. "That's not the sort of thing you can say to
a man, Katie," he said in shaking voice.

"A game for cheats," she repeated. "The cheats who cheat with life--and
then make rules around their cheating and boast about the 'honor' of
keeping those rules. You'd scorn a man who cheated at cards. Oh you're
very virtuous--all of you--in your scorn of lesser cheats. What's cards
compared with the divinest thing in life!"

"I tell you, I played fair," he insisted, his voice still unsteady.

"Why to be sure you did--according to the rules laid down by the cheats!"

Wayne came upon her upstairs a little later, sobbing. And sobbingly she
told the story--her face buried too much of the time for her to see her
brother's face, too shaken by her own sobs to mark how strange was his
breathing. Wayne did not accuse her of not having played a fair game. He
said almost nothing at all, save at the last, and that under his breath:
"We'll move heaven and earth to get her back!"

His one reproach was--"Oh Katie--you might have told _me_!"

CHAPTER XXVII

But they did not get her back. July had passed, and August, and most of
September, and they had not found Ann.

Heaven and earth were not so easily moved.

Katie had tried, and the man who mended the boats had tried, and Wayne,
but to no avail.

There had come the one letter from her--letter seeking to save "Ann" for
Katie. It was a key to Ann, but no key to her whereabouts save that it
was postmarked Chicago.

Those last three months had impressed Katie with the tragic
indefiniteness of the Chicago postmark.

She had spent the greater part of the summer there, at a quiet little
hotel on the North Side, where she was nominally one of a party of army
women. That was the olive