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
cannot rescue. It was in Ann's eyes--that looking out from shadowy
retreat, that pain of pain remembered, that fear which fear has left.
Katie had seen it once in the eyes of an exhausted fawn, who, fleeing
from the searchers for the stag, had come full upon the waiting hunt--in
face of the frantic hounds in leash. The terror in those eyes that
should have been so soft and gentle, the sick certitude of doom where
there should have been the glad joy of life struck the death blow to
Katie's ambitions to become the mighty huntress. She had never joined
another hunt or wished to hear another story of the hunt, saying she
flattered herself she could be resourceful enough to gain her pleasures
in some other way than crazing gentle creatures with terror. Ann made her
think of that quivering fawn, suggesting, as the fawn had suggested, what
life might have been in a woods uninvaded. She had a vision of Ann as the
creature of pure delight she had been fashioned to be, loving life and
not knowing fear.

From which musings she broke off with a hearty: "Good drive!" and Ann
looked up inquiringly.