ircumstances of
existence. Sometimes her straying mind would become astonishingly
active--embroidering bright and decorative things that she could say to
Capes; sometimes it passed into a state of passive acquiescence, into
a radiant, formless, golden joy. She was aware of people--her aunt,
her father, her fellow-students, friends, and neighbors--moving about
outside this glowing secret, very much as an actor is aware of the dim
audience beyond the barrier of the footlights. They might applaud, or
object, or interfere, but the drama was her very own. She was going
through with that, anyhow.

The feeling of last days grew stronger with her as their number
diminished. She went about the familiar home with a clearer and clearer
sense of inevitable conclusions. She became exceptionally considerate
and affectionate with her father and aunt, and more and more concerned
about the coming catastrophe that she was about to precipitate upon
them. Her aunt had a once exasperating habit of interrupting her work
with demands for small household services, but now Ann Veronica rendered
them with a queer readiness of anticipatory propitiation. She was
greatly exercised by the problem of confiding in the Widgetts; they were
dears, and she talked away two evenings with Constance without broaching
the topic; she made some vague intimations in letters to Miss Miniver
that Miss Miniver failed to mark. But she did not bother her head very
much about her relations with these sympathizers.

And at length her penultimate day in Morningside Park dawned for her.
She got up early, and walked about the garden in the dewy June sunshine
and revived her childhood. She was saying good-bye to childhood and
home, and her making; she was going out into the great, multitudinous
world; this time there would be no returning. She was at the end of
girlhood and on the eve of a woman's crowning experience. She visited
the corner that had been her own little garden--her forget-me-nots and
candytuft had long since been elbowed into insignificance by weeds; she
visited the raspberry-canes that had sheltered that first love affair
with the little boy in velvet, and the greenhouse where she had been
wont to read her secret letters. Here was the place behind the shed
where she had used to hide from Roddy's persecutions, and here the
border of herbaceous perennials under whose stems was fairyland. The
back of the house had been the Alps for climbing, and the shrubs
i