He did go colorless at that. "That's not the sort of thing you can say to a man, Katie," he said in shaking voice.
"A game for cheats," she repeated. "The cheats who cheat with life—and then make rules around their cheating and boast about the 'honor' of keeping those rules. You'd scorn a man who cheated at cards. Oh you're very virtuous—all of you—in your scorn of lesser cheats. What's cards compared with the divinest thing in life!"
"I tell you, I played fair," he insisted, his voice still unsteady.
"Why to be sure you did—according to the rules laid down by the cheats!"
Wayne came upon her upstairs a little later, sobbing. And sobbingly she told the story—her face buried too much of the time for her to see her brother's face, too shaken by her own sobs to mark how strange was his breathing. Wayne did not accuse her of not having played a fair game. He said almost nothing at all, save at the last, and that under his breath: "We'll move heaven and earth to get her back!"
His one reproach was—"Oh Katie—you might have told me!"
CHAPTER XXVII
But they did not get her back. July had passed, and August, and most of
September, and they had not found Ann.
Heaven and earth were not so easily moved.
Katie had tried, and the man who mended the boats had tried, and Wayne, but to no avail.