“Well, of course, Mother, one can’t be sure of such a thing from across the street, looking on at one chance meeting, but it does seem as though our Anne’s keen eyes were not far wrong,” Joan announced. “Kit has an air of profound admiration. I couldn’t say as to Anne Dallas; you can’t tell much about a girl. I wonder! They’ve gone on now, in opposite directions. What a handsome boy Kit is! So manly, carries himself so well! He has the nicest smile I ever saw--except Antony’s! I wonder, I do wonder!” “Anne is a dear girl,” said Mrs. Berkley. “If it were so--poor Richard Latham!” “Oh, Mother, you don’t think----” began Joan. “Anne is a dear girl,” repeated her mother. “Do you suppose it is likely that a lonely, hungry-hearted man like Richard Latham, sitting in darkness all his days, could have such a girl as Anne beside him constantly, writing his poems at his dictation, reading to him in her soft, lovely voice, serving him in countless ways, and not learn to love her? I’ve been hoping it would be so. For why should not Anne Dallas love him? Blindness is rather attractive than forbidding to a girl as sweetly compassionate as Anne. And to take at his dictation his beautiful words, his exquisite fancies, to hear them first of all the world, to come to feel, to know, that you inspired most of them, to write them for him and be the medium through which the world knows them--can you imagine better food for love?” “Well, now you say it,” admitted Joan, slowly. “But if this attractive Kit, full of charm, young, does come wooing--I wonder! Poor Mr. Latham, indeed!” “Perhaps we should say poor Miss Anne Carrington?” suggested Mrs. Berkley. “Kit’s aunt would surely take the advent of Anne Dallas hard. She is inordinately proud of Kit, ambitious for him. She has intended him to marry Helen Abercrombie who is intemperately rich in her own right, and is the only child of ex-Governor Abercrombie. Miss Carrington had her here last summer, don’t you remember?” “With her car and other paraphernalia; of course!” agreed Joan. “Since we are distributing pity, Motherums, we’d better shed some on Kit and Anne, if they are interested in each other, for Miss Carrington would certainly make the course of their true love run uncommonly rough! I must go home to my daughter. Isn’t it thrilling to think that we may have seen the curtain rise on an old-fashioned love drama, with a rival, a stern parent--an aunt comes to the same thing when she holds the hero’s inheritance--the princess whom the young lover should marry, everything properly cast! Anne, you witch-child, you are an uncanny elf! Good-bye, dear.” Joan kissed her mother and her sister and was gone. Anne stood scowling at the table cover, motionless for several minutes, unseeing, lost in thought. “Anne, dear, what is it?” her mother aroused her.