gave up the fight for control, and began to cry bitterly
again. "Oh, I'm so HOMESICK!" she sobbed, "and I'm so LONESOME! And I'm
so sick, sick, sick of this place! Oh, I think I'll go crazy if I can't
go home! I bear it and I BEAR it," said Patricia, in a sort of
desperate self-defence, "and then the time comes when I simply CAN'T
bear it!" And again she wept luxuriously, and Paul, in an agony of
sympathy, patted her hand.

"My heart is just breaking!" she burst out again, her tears and words
tumbling over each other. "It--it isn't RIGHT! I want my friends, and I
want my youth--I'll never be twenty-six again! I want to put my things
into a suit-case and go off with the other girls for country
visits--and I want to dance!" She put her head down again, and after a
moment Paul ventured a timid, "Patricia, dear, DON'T."

He thought she had not heard him, but after a moment, he was relieved
to see her resolutely straighten up again, and dry her eyes, and push
up her tumbled hair.

"Well, I really will STOP," she said determinedly. "This will not do!
If Alan even suspected! But, you see, I'm naturally a sociable person,
and I had--well, I don't suppose any girl ever had such a good time in
New York! My aunt did for me just what she did for her own daughters--a
dance at Sherry's, and dinners--! Paul, I'd give a year of my life just
to drive down the Avenue again on a spring afternoon, and bow to every
one, and have tea somewhere, and smell the park--oh, did you ever smell
Central Park in the spring?"

Both were silent. After a long pause Paul said:

"Why DO you stay? You've not got to ask a stepfather for a job."

"Alan," she answered simply. "No, don't say that," she interrupted him
quickly; "I'm nothing of the sort! But my mother--my mother, in a way,
left Alan and me to each other, and I have never done anything for
Alan. I went to the Eastern aunt, and he stayed here; and after a while
he drifted East--and he had too much money, of course! And I wasn't
half affectionate enough; he had his friends and I had mine! Well then
he got ill, and first it was just a cold and then it was,
suddenly--don't you know?--a question of consultations, and a dry
climate, and no dinners or wine or late hours. And Alan
refused--refused flat to go anywhere, until I said I'd LOVE to come!
I'll never forget the night it came over me that I ought to. I am--I
was--engaged, you know?" She paused.

Paul cleared his throat. "No, I didn't know