“No, it’s harder to explain than secrets are,” smiled Anne. “It’s not connected, except as I make it so. You see, Mr. Carrington, I have a wee income, but I could make it suffice for my living--that is if I lived so that it would suffice! I doubt you’d think I could. I suppose I’d have gone on living on it, for I’m not an ambitious person; I’m naturally inclined to ignoble content with little ways and little days! But when the war came I--well, as you put it, I was hard hit! It wasn’t as if I were grief-stricken. I had no one in it. But it was as if I had everyone out of it! I mean it took the heart of the things which were most important. I was too young to keep my balance. I got it back, or a new one that I hope, I know, will stand a strain when it comes. When my confusion of mind was set straight, then I knew that I must not sit down in sloth all my life, calling it pretty, misleading names, like ‛contentment,’ ‛humility,’ anything lulling. I made up my mind to use any slight ability that I had and try to----” She hesitated. “Help,” Kit said, softly. “Well, at least not grow inward,” Anne admitted. “That’s all. I couldn’t explain all this to Miss Carrington. It does sound silly, but that’s only because I’m not able to do important work. It wouldn’t sound foolish if I were going to--what was it that little Anne was saying to you? Be a Carmelite? Something like that, you know.” She looked up at Kit with her brown eyes shy and abashed, but he did not seem to consider her silly. “To be eyes to the blind, to help a poet write what Mr. Latham writes--or I hear that he does; I don’t honestly know much about it yet--seems to me pretty fine,” he said. “Aunt Anne told me that the painter, Wilberforce, got you to undertake Latham.” “Yes,” Anne assented. “Now, Mr. Carrington, why were you so blue when you came this afternoon? Do you want to ‛trade,’ as children say? I told you my secret.” “Oh, how can I?” Kit blushed to his hair. “All that I could tell you would sound like a spoiled, selfish kid! Aunt Anne has a guest coming, a young lady, and I’ve got to see it through, and I hate it! That’s about all.” Kit checked the violence with which he had brought out the word “hate,” and ended with a modification of the truth. “Ah?” Anne raised her eyebrows. She thought that she saw more than Kit said, remembering what Miss Carrington had hinted of Kit’s prospects for marriage. “But that ought not to be tragic!” Anne continued with a laugh. “It does sound like a boy who had had too much his own way! The only thing for you to do is to make the guest’s way your way. When you are both young that surely is easy to do! Is she pretty?” “No, she isn’t! She’s a beauty,” grumbled Kit with such an effect of this being the unpardonable sin that Anne laughed outright. “And her way can’t be my way. That’s what Aunt Anne wants me to do: make our way parallel. I won’t! Don’t you give me the same advice!”