had kindled illumined not a political career, but
the small vivid image of Patty. Wherever he looked he saw her flitting
ahead of him, a figure painted on sunlight. He had never found her so
desirable as in those few days since he had irrevocably given her up.
His self-denial, his vain endeavours to avoid her and forget her, seemed
merely to have poured themselves into the deep rebellious longing of his
heart. He lived always now in that hidden country of the mind, where
the winds blew free and strong and the sun never set on the endless
roads and the far horizon.

And yet, so inexplicable are the laws of the mind, this escape from the
tyranny of convention, from the irksome round of practical details,
recoiled perversely into an increased joy of living. Because he could
escape at will from the routine, he no longer dreaded to return to it.
The light which irradiated the image of Patty transfigured the events
and circumstances amid which he moved. It shed its glory over external
incidents as well as into the loneliest vacancy, the deserted places, of
his being. Everything around and within him, the very youth in his soul,
became more intense in the hours when he allowed this emotion to assume
control of his thoughts. Just to be alive, that was enough! Just to be
free again from the sensation of stifling in trivial things, of
suffocating in the monotony which rushed over one like a torrent of
ashes. Just to escape with Patty into that wild kingdom of the mind
where the sun never set!

When he returned home that evening, his mother met him as he entered the
hall, and followed him upstairs.

"It is a beautiful evening for the dance, dear. They are having the
garden illuminated."

Though he smiled back at her, his smile had that dreamy remoteness, that
look of meaning more than it revealed, which was bewildering to an acute
and practical intelligence. From long and intimate association with her
husband, Mrs. Culpeper was accustomed to dealing with ponderous barriers
to knowledge; but this plastic and variable substance of Stephen's
resistance, gave her an uncomfortable feeling of helplessness. Even when
her son acquiesced, as he did usually in her demands, she suspected that
his acquiescence was merely on the surface, that in the depths of his
mind he was, as she said to herself resentfully, "holding something
back."

"Margaret is looking so sweet," she began in her smoothest tone. "Of
course she isn't the beauty tha