window, other human beings were breathing, sleeping, dreaming, like Patty and herself, of some impractical and visionary to-morrow.  Of something which had never been, but still might be!  Of something which they had just missed, but might find when the sun rose again!  Of a miracle that might occur at any moment and make everything different!  It was after midnight; and to Corinna it seemed that the darkness had released the collective spirit of the city, which would retreat again into itself with the breaking of dawn.  Once a cry sounded far off and was hushed almost immediately; once a light flashed and went out in the window beneath a roof; but as the car sped on by rows of darkened tenements, the mysterious penumbra of the night appeared to draw closer and closer, as if that also were a phantom of the encompassing obscurity.

“Is this the aunt you told me of, Patty?” asked Corinna abruptly.

“Yes, I went to see her once—­not long ago.  I promised her that I’d come back when she sent for me.  She wanted to tell me something, but she was so ill that she couldn’t remember what it was.  It was about Father, she said.”

“Stephen will come for us after he has taken Margaret home.  I gave him the number.”

Patty turned and gave her a long look.  They were passing under an electric light at the time, and Corinna thought, as she looked into the girl’s face, that all the wistful yearning of the night was reflected in her eyes.  What had happened, she wondered, to change their sparkling brightness into this brooding expectancy.

The car stopped before the house to which Patty had come with Gershom; and as they got out, they saw that it was entirely dark except for the dim flicker of a jet of gas in the hall.  By the pavement a car was standing, and from somewhere at the back there came the sound of a baby crying inconsolably in the darkness.  While they entered the hall, and went up the broad old-fashioned flight of stairs, that plaintive wail followed them, growing gradually fainter as they ascended, but never fading utterly into silence.  When they reached the second storey, and turned toward the back of the house, a door at the end of the passage opened, and an old woman, with a hunch back, and a piece of knitting in her gnarled hands, came slowly to meet them.  Standing there under the jet of gas, which flickered with a hissing noise, she looked at them with glassy impersonal eyes and a face that was as austere as Destiny.  Afterward, when Corinna thought over the impressions of that tragic night, she felt that they were condensed into the symbol of the old woman with the crooked back, and the thin crying of the baby which floated up from the darkness below.

“We came to see Mrs. Green,” explained Corinna.