After a moment Ann said quietly: "I hate her."
"So would I," said Katie, and it brought the ghost of a smile to Ann's lips, perhaps thinking of just how cordially Katie would hate her.
"And then after a while you left this town?" Katie suggested as Ann seemed held there by something.
"Yes, after a while I left." And that held her again.
"I was fifteen when I—freed Tono from life," she emerged from it. "It was five years later that you—stopped me from freeing myself. Lots of things were crowded into those five years, Katie—or rather into the last three of them. I had to be treated worse than Tono was treated before it came to me that I had better be as kind to myself as I had been to my dog. Only I," Ann laughed, "didn't have anybody to give me a last hour!"
"But you see it wasn't a last hour, after all," soothed Katie. "Only the last hour of the old hard things. Things that can never come back."
"Can't they come back, Katie? Can't they?"
Katie shook her head with decision. "Do you think I'd let them come back? Why I'd shut the door in their face!"
"Sometimes," said Ann, "it seems to me they're lying in wait for me. That they're going to spring out. That this is a dream. That there isn't any Katie Jones. Some nights I've been afraid to go to sleep. Afraid of waking to find it a dream. There's an awful dream I dream sometimes! The dream is that this is a dream."
"Poor dear," murmured Katie. "It will be more real now that we've talked."