“Well, where did I leave myself?  Oh yes—­waiting.  Sitting there busily engaged in hating you.  Then she came across the grass—­making straight for the river—­running.  I saw that you saw, and the thing that mattered to me then was what you would do about it.  Saved or not saved, she was gone—­I thought.  The crowd had squeezed it all out of her.  The live thing to me was what you—­the You of the world that you became to me—­would do about her.”

He paused, smiling at that absurd and noble vision of Katie tumbling down the bunker.  “And when you did what you did do—­it was so treacherously disarming, the quick-witted humanity, the clever tenderness of it—­I loved you so for it that I just couldn’t go on hating.  There’s where you’re a dangerous person.  How dare you—­standing for the You of the world—­dampen the splendid ardor of my hate?”

Katie did not let pass her chance.  “Perhaps if the Me of the world were known a little more intimately it would be less hated.”

He shook his head.  “They just happened to have you.  They can’t keep you.”

There was another one of those pauses which drew them so much closer than the words.  She knew what he was wondering, and he knew that she knew.  At length she colored a little and called him back to the greater reserve of words.

“I saw how royally you put it through.  I could see you standing there on the porch, looking back to the river.  I’ve wanted several things rather badly in my life, but I doubt if I’ve ever wanted anything much worse than to know what you were saying.  And then with my own two eyes I saw the miracle:  Saw her—­the girl who had just had all the concentrated passion of the Her of the world—­turn and follow you into the house.  It was a blow to me!  Oh ’twas an awful blow.”

“Why a blow?”

“In the first place that you should want to, and then that you should be able to.  My philosophy gives you of the sunny paths no such desire nor power.”

“Showing,” she deduced quickly and firmly, “that your philosophy is all wrong.”

“Oh no; showing that the much toasted Miss Katherine Jones is too big for mere sunny paths.  Showing that she has a latent ambition to climb a mountain in a storm.”

Fleetingly she wondered how he should know her for the much toasted Miss Katherine Jones, but in the center of her consciousness rose that alluring picture of climbing a mountain in a storm.

“Tell me how you did it.”

“Why—­I don’t know.  I had no method.  I told her I needed her.”

“You—­needed her?”

“And afterwards, in a different way, I told her that again.  And I did.  I do.”

“Why do you need her?  How do you need her?” he urged gently.

She hesitated.  Her mouth—­her splendid mouth shaped by stern or tender thinking to lines of exquisite fineness or firmness—­trembled slightly, and the eyes which turned seriously upon him were wistful.  “Perhaps,” said Katie, “that even on sunny paths one guesses that there are such things as storms in the mountains.”