“If he does,” said Corinna firmly, “I shall be more surprised than I have ever been in my life.”

The look of martyrdom faded slowly from her visitor’s features.  “You say this because you know Stephen?”

“Because I know Stephen—­and men,” answered Corinna, while she thought of John Benham.  “Frankly, I think it would be a splendid thing for Stephen to do.  It would prove, you know, that he cared enough to make a sacrifice.  I think it would be splendid; but I think also that we are of the breed that looks too long before it leaps.  Our great adventures take place in dreams or in talk.  We like to play with forlorn hopes; but the only forlorn hope we have actually embraced is the conservative principle; and we couldn’t let that go, even if we tried, because it is bred in our bone.  So I believe that the ^hereditary habit will drag Stephen safely back before he rushes into danger.  He may play with the thought of Patty, but he will probably marry Margaret.”

If Mrs. Culpeper’s too refined features could have expressed passion, it would have been the passion of thankfulness.  “It was worth coming,” she said, “to hear you say that of Stephen.”

When at last she had gone, primly grateful for the scrap of comfort, Corinna stood for a minute with her eyes on the sunbeams at the window.  Outside there were the roving winds and the restless spirit of April; and feeling suddenly that she could stand the close walls and the familiar objects no longer, she put on her hat and gloves and went out into the street.  Scarcely knowing why, with some vague thought that she might go to see Patty, she turned in the direction of the Capitol Square, walking with her buoyant grace which seemed a part of the fugitive beauty of April.  The air was so fragrant, the sunshine so softly burning, that it was as if summer were advancing, not gradually, but in a single miracle of florescence.  It was one of those days which release all the secret inexpressible dreams of the heart.  Every face that she passed was touched with the wistful longing which is the very essence of spring.  She saw it in the faces of the women who hurried, warm, flushed, and impatient, from the shops or the markets; she saw it in the faces of the men returning from work and thinking of freedom; and she saw it again in the long sad faces of the dray-horses standing hitched to a city cart at the corner.

In the Square the sunlight lay in splinters over the young grass, which was dotted with buttercups, and overhead the long black boughs of the trees were sprinkled with pale green leaves.  Back and forth from the grassy slopes to the winding brick walks, squirrels darted, busy and joyous; and a few old men, never absent from the benches, were smiling vaguely at the passers-by.