As the Captain was looking at Ann and not seeming overpowered with
amazement, looking, on the other hand, as though seeing something rarely
good to look at, Katie had the courage to look too. And at what she saw
her heart swelled quite as the heart of the mother swells when the child
speaks his piece unstutteringly. Ann was _doing_ it!--rising to the
occasion--meeting the situation. Then she had other qualities no less
valuable than looking Florentine. That thing of _doing_ it was a thing
that had always commanded the affectionate admiration of Katie Jones.

It was not what Ann did so much as her effective manner of doing nothing.
One would not say she lacked assurance; one would put it the other
way--that she seemed shy. It seemed to Katie she looked for all the world
like a startled bird, and it also seemed that Captain Prescott
particularly admired startled birds.

He turned and rode a little way beside them, he and Katie assuming
conversational responsibilities. But Ann's smile warmed her aloofness,
and her very shyness seemed well adjusted to her fragility. "And just
fits in with what I told him!" gloated Kate. And though she said so
little, for some reason, perhaps because she looked so different, one got
the impression of her having said something unusual. She had a way of
listening which conveyed the impression she could say things worth
listening to--if she chose. One took her on faith.

He said to her at the last, with that direct boyish smile it seemed could
not frighten even a startled bird: "You think you are going to like it
here?" And Ann replied, slowly, a tremor in her voice, and a child's
earnestness and sweetness in it too: "I think it the most beautiful place
I ever saw in all my life."