aginative minds--to minds that have known darkness as well as light.
In that instant of realization, he knew, beyond all doubt, that he stood
not for the past, but for the future, that he stood not for philosophy,
but for adventure--for the will to be and to dare. He would choose, once
for all, to take the risk of happiness; to conquer inch by inch a little
more of the romantic wilderness of wonder and delight. While he stood
there, looking down into her eyes, these impressions came to him less
in words than in a glorious sense of youth, of power, of security of
spirit.

"I looked for you so long," he said, and then breathlessly, as if he
feared lest she might escape him, "Oh, Patty, I love you!"

Before she could reply, before he could repeat the words that drummed in
his brain, the door into the present swung open, and the dream world,
with its flower-like shadows and its violet dusk, vanished.

"Patty!" called Corinna's voice. "Patty, dear, I am looking for you."
Corinna, in her rustling white and silver brocade, stepped from the
French window out on the porch. "Some one has sent for you--your aunt, I
think they said, who is dying--"

The girl started and drew back. Her face changed, while the light faded
from her eyes until they became wells of darkness. "I know," she
answered. "I must go. I promised that I would go."

"My car is waiting. I will take you," said Corinna.

She turned to enter the house, and Patty, without so much as a look at
Stephen's face, went slowly after her.

CHAPTER XXII

THE NIGHT

As the car passed through the deserted streets, Corinna placed her hand
on Patty's with a reassuring pressure. Without appearing to do so, she
was studying the girl's soft profile, now flashing out in a sudden sharp
light, now melting back again into the vagueness of the shadows. What
was there about this girl, Corinna asked herself, which appealed so
strongly to the protective impulse in her heart? Was it because this
undisciplined child, with that curious sporting instinct which supplied
the place of Victorian morality, represented for her, as well as for
Stephen, some inarticulate longing for the unknown, for the adventurous?
Did Patty's charm for them both lie in her unlikeness to everything they
had known in the past? In Corinna, as in Stephen, two opposing spirits
had battled unceasingly, the realistic spirit which accepted life as it
was, and the romantic spirit which struggled toward some u