ng over the city, that
city which was outgrowing its youth, outgrowing the barriers of
tradition, outgrowing alike the forces of reaction and the forces of
progress.

"A few months," he said slowly, "and nothing accomplished that one can
point out and say that we owe directly to him. Yet I doubt if a single
one of us will ever forget him. I doubt if a single one of us will ever
be exactly, in every little way, just what we should have been if we had
never known Vetch, or spoken to him. The merest ripple of change,
perhaps, but it counts--it counts because in touching him we touched a
humanity that is as rare as genius itself." Yet they had killed him,
Corinna knew, because they could not understand him!

For a moment there was silence, and then Stephen spoke in a whisper:
"There are some things that you can't see until you stand far enough
away from them. I doubt if any of us really saw him until to-night.
To-morrow he will begin to live." As he lifted his eyes to Corinna's
face, she saw in them a fidelity that pledged itself to the future.

"Go to Patty," she whispered. "Go to her and repeat what you have said
to us." Putting her hand on his arm, she led him into the room where the
girl was kneeling, and then drew back while he went quickly forward.
Watching from the threshold, she saw Patty look up uncertainly, and rise
slowly from the floor where she had been kneeling; she saw Stephen put
out his arms with a movement of love and pity; and she saw the girl
hesitate for an instant, and then turn to his clasp as a hurt child
turns for comfort. That was youth, that was the future, thought Corinna,
and closing the door softly, she left them together. Yes, youth was for
the future, and for herself, _she_ realized with a pang, were the things
that she had never had in the past. Only the things that she had never
had were really hers! Only the unfulfilled, she saw in that moment of
illuminating insight, is the permanent.

Passing the group in the hall, she went out on the porch, and looked
with swimming eyes over the fountain into the Square. Beyond the white
streams of electricity and the black patterns of the shadows, she saw
the sharp outlines of the city, and beyond that the immense blue field
of the sky sown thickly with stars. Life was there--life that embraced
success and failure, illusion and disillusion, birth and death. In the
morning she would go back to it--she would begin again--in the morning
she would will