eak eyes to the
smoke-stained ceiling, and repeated for the third time in a tone of
profound contempt: "Air!"

At the foot of the stairs, Corinna ran against Gideon Vetch. "She died
soon after you went out," she said, "but Patty is still there."

"I'll go up to her," he answered; and then as he placed his foot on the
bottom step, he looked back at her, and added, "I tried to spare her
this."

She assented almost mechanically. Fatigue had swept over her from head
to foot like some sinister drug and she felt incapable of giving out
anything, even sympathy, even the appearance of compassion. "Then it is
all true?" she asked. "Patty is not your child?"

A shadow crossed his face, but he did not hesitate in his reply. "I
never had a child. I was never married."

"You took her like that--because the mother was going to prison?"

He nodded. "She was a child. What difference did it make whether she was
mine or not? She was the nicest little thing you ever saw. She is
still."

"Yes, she is still. But you never knew what became of the mother?"

"I didn't know her real name. I didn't want to. The circus people called
her Queenie, that was all I knew. She'd stuck a knife into a man in a
jealous rage, and he happened to die. They said the trial would be
obliged to go against her. I was leaving California that night, and I
brought the child with me. I have never been back--" He spread out his
broad hand with a gesture that was strangely human. "You would have done
it in my place?"

She shook her head. "No, I should have wanted to, but I couldn't. I am
not big enough for that."

He was already ascending the stairs, but at her words, he turned and
smiled down on her. "It was nothing to make a fuss about," he said.
"Anybody would have done it."

Then he mounted the stairs lightly for his great height, taking two
steps at a time, while she passed out on the porch where Stephen was
waiting for her. As he rose wearily from the wicker rocking chair beside
the empty perambulator, she felt as if he were a stranger. In that one
night she seemed to have put the whole universe between her and the old
order that he represented.

"I kept my car waiting for you," he began. "It was better to let your
man go home."

She smiled at him in the pale light, and he broke out nervously: "You
look as if you would drop. What have they done to you?" Though she wore
the cloak of peacock-blue over her evening gown, the pointed train wound
on th