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“Are you alone in the world, such a pretty child as you?” Miss Carrington’s tone expressed sympathy.

“I have a few cousins; no one else,” said Anne. She looked up confidingly into the keen eyes above her. “The war was hard on me. No, not a personal grief; I lost no one, there was no one in it that I dearly loved,” she anticipated Miss Carrington’s question. “But it made me feel that everything I knew wasn’t so, and the bleakness——” She checked herself with a shudder. “But after that I saw that everything that I had known was a thousand times truer than I had thought it was. I suppose everyone went through that experience, but to each of us it was like being born, wasn’t it?”

“Ah!” murmured Miss Carrington, emphatically but discreetly. She had not known this melding with impersonal agony.

“Oh, yes, of course it was what we all felt,” Anne hastily disclaimed difference between herself and the rest of the world. “Then I wanted to do something in this burdened world, even though peace, of a sort, had come.”