Little Anne passively allowed herself to be kissed, and beat a rapid retreat. She had corked up her feelings to the last possible instant. Though the maturity which she anticipated attaining in October, when she was eight, was still some weeks distant, something told the child that Anne was hiding an aching heart. CHAPTER XIX _The End of the Play_ Although Mrs. Berkley readily consented to little Anne’s seeing the first performance of Richard Latham’s play, and although this was an event to dream of by night and by day until its distant date, little Anne was not completely happy in its anticipation. The play was so much one with Anne Dallas that they could not be recalled separately. It loomed above all else in little Anne’s mind that when the great night came Anne would be married. Everyone spoke impressively of being married. Little Anne absorbed the general attitude toward it and was deeply impressed by the fact that her dear Anne would be in the same box with her that first night of the play--she wondered what sort of a box it could possibly be--no longer her Anne, but married. Twice little Anne had come upon Anne weeping her heart out as tempestuously as she had cried on the child’s shoulder. Anne was not happy; she was growing so thin and pale that Mrs. Berkley and Joan discussed it in little Anne’s hearing, though in terms intentionally, she thought, beyond her complete understanding. Little Anne was too loving to be quite happy about the play if Anne were not happy, too; she had grasped the fact that this unhappiness was connected with the play and being married; evidently Anne dreaded the night when she would sit in that mysterious box that held several grown people, but which did not seem to strike any one as an unusual type of box. Kit Carrington came often to the Berkley house these days, also to Joan’s. Little Anne found him in both houses the same; he was invariably a gloomy, dull Kit, from whom only she could extract anything like his old smile, and she but rarely. Kit looked not only unhappy and ill, but little Anne thought that he looked chronically “mad,” and surely there could have been nothing less like her old Kit than “a grouch!” It was Peter who said that Kit had a steady grouch on, so little Anne knew that she must be right. It was a melancholy state of things, and when she was not playing with Monica, or interested in something else, which was the greater part of the time, little Anne, like Miniver Cheevy, “thought, and thought and thought about it.”