eyond this there was the open door and the
glamour of the spring night, and in the night another group with its
dark burden.

"I met them just outside, and they told me," said Stephen. "Gershom
thinks it was an accident, but we shall never know probably. Two
opposing sides were fighting it out. A question had come up--nobody can
remember what it was--nothing important, I think--but two men came to
blows and he got in between them--he stood in the way--and somebody shot
him--"

He was talking, Corinna realized, in an effort to hold Patty's gaze, to
divert her eyes by the force of his look from the burden which the men
were bringing slowly up the steps outside and into the hall.

"Nobody meant to harm him," said Gershom suddenly, speaking from the
edge of the group. "The pistol went off by mistake. He got in the way
before any one saw him--" But from his look, Corinna knew that it was
not an accident, that they had shot him because he came between them and
the thing that they wanted.

The slow steps crossed the hall into the library, and above the measured
beat and pause of the sound, Corinna heard the voice of Vetch as
distinctly as if he were standing there before her in the centre of the
group. "The loneliest man on earth is the one who stands between two
extremes." Yes, at the end as well as at the beginning, he had stood
between two extremes! Then Patty's cry of anguish floated to her from
the room across the hall into which they had taken him. "Father!
Father!" Only that one word over and over again. "Father! Father!" Only
that one word uttered steadily and softly in a tone of imploring
helplessness like the wail of a frightened child. It never ceased, this
piteous sobbing, until at last the doctor went out, and left Corinna
alone with the girl and Gideon Vetch. Then Patty fell on her knees
beside the couch where he lay, and a silence that was almost suffocating
closed over the room.

The house had become very still. While Corinna waited there at Patty's
side, the only noise came from the restless movement of the city, which
sounded far off and vaguely ominous, like the disturbance in a nightmare
from which one has just awakened. She had turned off the unshaded
electric light; and for a few minutes Patty knelt alone in a merciful
dimness, which left her white dress and the composed features of the
dead man the only luminous spots in the room. It was as if these two
pallid spaces were living things in the midst