He gazed at her with a smile which had grown as tired as the rest of him.  “Then if you know why don’t you help—­you others?” he asked.  “Don’t you see that by standing aside, by keeping apart, you are doing all the harm that you can?  If democracy doesn’t seem good enough for you, then get down into the midst of it and make it better.  That’s the only way—­the only way on earth to make a better democracy—­by putting the best we’ve got into it.  You can’t make bread rise from the outside.  You’ve got to mix the yeast with the dough, if you want it to leaven the whole lump.”

She had been standing with her hands clasped before her and her eyes on the sky beyond the window; and when he paused, with a husky tone in his voice, she spoke almost as if she were in a dream.  “I believe in you,” she said, and then again, as he did not speak she repeated very slowly:  “I believe in you.”

“That helps,” he answered gravely.  “I don’t suppose you will ever realize how much that will help me.”  As he finished he turned toward the door; and a minute afterward, without another word or look, he went out into the street, and she saw his figure cross the flowers and the sunlight in the window.

When he had gone Corinna opened the door and stood watching the long black shadows of the cedars creep over the walk of broken flagstones.  Always when she was alone her thoughts would return like homing birds to John Benham; but this afternoon, though she spoke his name in her reflections, she was conscious of an inner detachment from the vital interests of her personal life.  For a little while, so strong was the mental impression Vetch had made on her, she saw his image even while she thought the name of John Benham.  Then, with an effort of will, she put the Governor and all that he had said out of her mind.  After all, how little would she ever see of him now—­how seldom would their paths cross in the future!  A strange and interesting man, a man who had, in one instant of mental sympathy, stirred something within her heart that no one, not even Kent Page, had ever awakened before.  For that one instant a ripple, nothing more, had moved on the face of the deep—­of the deep which was so ancient that it was older even than the blood of her race.  Then the ripple passed and the sunny stillness settled again on her spirit.

She thought of John Benham easily now; and while she stood there a quiet happiness shone in her eyes.  After the storm and stress of twenty years, life in this Indian summer of the emotions was like an enclosed garden of sweetness and bloom.  She had had enough of hunger and rapture and disappointment.  Never again would she take up the old search for perfection, for the starry flower of the heights.  Something that she could worship!  So often in the past it had seemed to her that she missed it by the turn of a corner, the stop on the roadside, by the choice of a path that led down into the valley instead of up into the hills.  So often her god had revealed the feet of clay just as she was preparing to scatter marigolds on his altar.  It appeared to her as she looked back on the past, that life had been merely a succession of great opportunities that one did not grasp, of high adventures that one never followed.