“If he hasn’t yet, my dear”—­while the words dropped from her reluctant lips, Corinna felt as if she were inflicting a physical stab,—­“how can you tell that he cares so much for you?”

“I wasn’t sure until yesterday,” replied Patty, with beaming lucidity, “but I knew yesterday because—­because he showed it so plainly.”

With a lovely protective movement the older woman put her arm about the girl’s shoulders.  “You may be right—­but, oh, don’t trust too much, Patty,” she pleaded, with the wisdom that the years bring and take away.  “Life is so uncertain—­fine impulses—­even love—­yes, love most of all—­is so uncertain—­”

“Of course you feel that way,” responded the girl, sympathetic but incredulous.  “How could you help it?”

After this what could Corinna answer?  She knew Stephen, she told herself, and she knew that she could trust him.  She believed that lie was capable of generous impulses; but she doubted if an impulse, however generous, could sweep away the inherited sentiments which encrusted his outlook on life.  In spite of his youth, he was in reality so old.  He was as old as that indestructible entity, the spirit of race—­as that impalpable strain which had existed in every Culpeper, and in all the Culpepers together, from the beginning.  It was not, she realized plainly, such an anachronism as a survival of the aristocratic tradition.  Deeper than this, it had its roots not in belief but in instinct—­in the bone and fibre of Stephen’s character.  It was a part of that motive power which impelled him in the direction of the beaten road, of the established custom, of things as they have always been in the past.

Her kind heart was troubled; yet before the happiness in the girl’s face what could she say except that she hoped Stephen was as fine as Patty believed him to be?  “You may be right.  I hope so with all my heart; but, oh, my dear, try not to care too much.  It never does any good to care too much.”  She stooped and kissed the girl’s cheek.  “There, my car is at the door, and I must hurry back to the shop.  I’ll do anything in the world that I can for you, Patty, anything in the world.”

As the car rolled through the gate and down the wide drive to the Washington monument, Patty stood gazing after it, with a burning moisture in her eyes and a lump in her throat.  Terror had seized her in an instant, terror of unhappiness, of missing the one thing in life on which she had passionately set her heart.  What had Mrs. Page meant by her questions?  Had she intended them as a warning?  And why should she have thought it necessary to warn her against caring too much for Stephen?

The girl had started to enter the house when, remembering suddenly that Gershom was still there, she turned hurriedly away from the door, and walked back down the brick pavement to the fountain beyond the library.  The squirrels still scampered over the walk; the thirsty sparrows were still drinking; the few loungers on the benches still stared at her with dull and incurious eyes.  Not a cloud stained the intense blue of the sky; and over the bright grass on the hillside the sunshine quivered like an immense swarm of bees.