In the golden-green light of afternoon the Square was looking peaceful and lovely.  For the hour a magic veil had dropped over the nakedness of its outlines, and the bare buildings and bare walks were touched with the glamour of spring.  Soft, pale shadows of waving branches moved back and forth, like the ghosts of dreams, over the grassy hill and the brick pavements.

Turning to the girl beside her, Corinna looked thoughtfully at the fresh young face above the white collar which framed the lovely line of the throat.  Under the brim of the sailor hat Patty’s eyes were dewy with happiness.

“Are you happy, Patty?”

“Oh, yes,” rejoined Patty fervently, “so much happier than I ever was in my life!”

“I am glad,” said the older woman tenderly.  Then taking the girl’s hand in hers she added earnestly:  “But, my dear, we must be careful, you and I, not to let our happiness depend too much upon one thing.  We must scatter it as much as we can.”

“I can’t do that,” answered Patty simply.  “I am not made that way.  I pour everything into one thought.”

“I know,” responded Corinna sadly, and she did.  She had lived through it all long ago in what seemed to her now another life.

For a moment she was silent; and when she spoke again there was an anxious sound in her voice and an anxious look in the eyes she lifted to the arching boughs of the sycamore.  “Do you like Stephen very much, Patty?” she asked.

Though Corinna did not see it, a glow that was like the flush of dawn broke over the girl’s sensitive face.  “He is so superior,” she began as if she were repeating a phrase she had learned to speak; then in a low voice she added impulsively, “Oh, very much!”

“He is a dear boy,” returned Corinna, really troubled.  “Do you see him often?” Now, since she felt she had won the girl’s confidence, her purpose appeared more difficult than ever.

“Very often,” replied Patty in a thrilling tone.  “He comes every day.”  The luminous candour, the fearless sincerity of Gideon Vetch, seemed to envelop her as she answered.

“Do you think he cares for you, dear?” asked Corinna softly.

“Oh, yes.”  The response was unhesitating.  “I know it.”

How naive, how touchingly ingenuous, the girl was in spite of her experience of life and of the uglier side of politicians.  No girl in Corinna’s circle would ever have appeared so confiding, so innocent, so completely beneath the spell of a sentimental illusion.  The girls that Corinna knew might be unguarded about everything else on earth; but even the most artless one of them, even Margaret Blair, would have learned by instinct to guard the secret of her emotions.

“Has he asked you to marry him?” Corinna’s voice wavered over the question, which seemed to her cruel; but Patty met it with transparent simplicity.

“Not yet,” she answered, lifting her shining eyes to the sky, “but he will.  How can he help it when he cares for me so much?”