r you will be saying, dear uncle, that
a yearning for peace has never been one of the most conspicuous of my
attributes."

There she fell to nibbling again, looking over at the girl in the deep
garden chair in the choice corner of the big porch. "My friend Ann
Forrest!" Katie murmured, smiling strangely.

Her friend Ann Forrest was turning the leaves of a book, "Days in
Florence," which Kate had left carelessly upon the arm of the chair she
commended to Ann. It was after watching her covertly for sometime that
Katie set down, a little elf dancing in her eye, yet something of the
seer in that very eye in which the elf danced:

"Of course you have heard me tell of Ann, the girl to whom I was so
devoted in Italy. I should think, uncle, that you of the cloth would find
Ann a most interesting subject. Not that she's of your flock. Her mother
was a passionate Catholic. Her father a relentless atheist. He wrote a
famous attack on the church which Ann tells me hastened her mother's
death. The conflict shows curiously in Ann. When we were together in
Florence a restlessness would many times come upon her. She would say,
'You go on home, Katie, without me. I have things to attend to.' I came
to know what it meant. Once I followed her and saw her go to the church
and literally fling herself into its arms in a passion of surrender. And
that night she sat up until daybreak reading her father's books. You see
what I mean? A wealth of feeling--but always pulled two ways. It has left
its mark upon her."

She read it over, gloated over it, and destroyed it. "Uncle would be
coming on the next train," she saw. "He'd hold Ann up for a copy of the
attack! And why this mad passion of mine for destruction? Should a man
walking on a tight-rope yield to every playful little desire to chase
butterflies?"

But as she looked again--Ann was deep in the illustrations of "Days in
Florence" and could be surveyed with impunity--she wondered if she might
not have written better than she knew. Her choice of facts doubtless was
preposterous enough; what had been the conflicting elements--her fancy
might wander far afield in finding that. But she was sure she saw truly
in seeing marks of conflict. Life had pulled her now this way, now that,
as if playing some sort of cruel game with her. And that game had left
her very tired. Tired as some lovely creature of the woods is tired after
pursuit, and fearful with that fear of the hunted from which safety