things, don't you think so? Mine seem particularly athletic.
They hop from their pigeon holes and turn hand-springs and do all sorts
of stunts the minute I turn my back. So I never know for sure why I want
to do a thing. For that matter, I don't know why I named you Ann. I had
to give you a name--I thought you might prefer my not using yours--so all
in a flash I had to make one up--and Ann was what came. I love that name.
It never would have come if something in you hadn't called it. The Ann in
you has had a hard time." She was speaking uncertainly, timidly, as if on
ground where words had broken no paths. "Oh, I'm not so much the outsider
I can't see that. But the Ann in you has never died. That I see, too.
Maybe it was to save Ann you were going to--give up Verna. And because I
see Ann--like her--because I called her back, won't you let her stay
here and--" Katie's voice broke, so to offset that she cocked her head
and made a wry little face as she concluded, not succeeding in concealing
the deep tenderness in her eyes, "just try--the eggs?"

CHAPTER VIII

Katie was writing to her uncle the Bishop. At least that was what she
would have said she was doing. To be literal, she was nibbling at the end
of her pen.

Writing to her uncle had never been a solemn affair with Kate. She
gossiped and jested with him quite as she would with a playfellow; it was
playfellow, rather than spiritual adviser, he had always been to her,
Kate's need seeming rather more for playfellows than for spiritual
advisers. But the trouble that morning was that the things of which she
was wont to gossip and jest seemed remote and uninteresting things.

Finally she wrote: "My friend Ann Forrest is with us now. I am hoping to
be able to keep her for some time. Poor dear, she has not been well and
has had much sorrow--such a story!--and I think the peace of things
here--peace you know, uncle, being poetic rendition of stupidity--is just
what Ann needs."

A robin on a lilac bush entered passionate protest against the word
stupidity. "What will you have? What will you _have_?" trilled the robin
in joyous frenzy.

Wise robin! After all, what would one have? And when within the world
of May that robins love one was finding a whole undiscovered country
to explore?

"No, I don't mean that about stupidity," she wrote after a wide look and
a deep breath. "It does seem peace. Peace that makes some other things
seem stupidity. I must be tired, fo