“Oh, wise!” She shook her head with an impatient movement.  “Isn’t the only wisdom to be happy and kind?”

He looked at her thoughtfully, while a frown drew his straight dark eyebrows together.  “If you wanted a thing with all your heart, and yet were not sure—­”

Her impatience answered him.  “I couldn’t want it with all my heart without being sure.”

“Sure I mean that it is best—­best for every one—­not just for oneself—­”

Her laugh was like a song.  “Do you suppose there has ever been anything since the world began that was best for every one?  If I knew what I wanted I shouldn’t ask anything more.  I would spread my wings and fly to it.”

He smiled.  “You are so much like your father at times—­even in the things that you say.  Yes, I suppose you would fly to it because you have been trained that way—­to be direct and daring.  But I am made differently.  Life has taught me; it is in my blood and bone to stop and question, to look so long that at last I lose the will to choose, or to leap.  There are some of us like that, you know.”

“Perhaps,” she smiled.  “I don’t know.  It seems to me a very silly way to be.”  The song had gone out of her voice, and a heaviness, an impalpable fear, had descended again on her heart.  Why did one’s path lead always through mazes of uncertainty and disappointment instead of straight onward toward one’s desire?  A passionate impulse seized her to fight for what she wanted, to grasp the fragile opportunity before it eluded her.  Yet she knew that fighting would not do any good.  She could do nothing while her happiness hung on a thread.  She could do nothing but fold her hands and wait, though her heart burned hot with the injustice of it, and she longed to speak aloud all the words that were rising to her tightly closed lips.

“Oh, don’t you see—­can’t you see?” she asked brokenly, baring her heart with a desperate impulse.  Her eyes were drawing him toward the future; and, in the deep stillness of her look, it seemed to him that she was putting forth all her power to charm; that her youth and bloom shed a sweetness that was like the fragrance of a flower.

For an instant every thought, every feeling, surrendered to her appeal.  Then his face changed as abruptly as if he had put a mask over his features; and glancing back over her shoulder, she saw that his mother and Margaret Blair were walking along the concrete pavement under the few old linden trees.  As they approached it seemed to the girl that Stephen turned slowly from a man of flesh and blood into a figure of granite.  In one instant he was petrified by the force of tradition.

“It is my mother,” he said in a low voice.  “She has not been in the Square for years.  I was telling her yesterday how pretty it looks in the spring.”  He went forward with an embarrassed air, and Mrs. Culpeper laid a firm, possessive touch on his arm.

“I thought a little stroll might do me good,” she explained.  “The car is waiting across the street at Doctor Bradley’s.”  Then she held out her free hand to Patty, with a smile which, the girl said afterward to Corinna, looked as if it had frozen on her lips.  “Stephen speaks of you very often, Miss Vetch,” she said.  “He talks a great deal about his friends, doesn’t he, Margaret?”