“Thank you,” said Corinna hurriedly.  “I must go down.  I must get a breath of air, but I will come back in a little while.”  Then she started at a run down the stairs, while the old woman gazed after her, as if the flying figure, in the cloak of peacock-blue satin and white fur, was that of a demented creature.  “Air!” she repeated, with scornful independence.  “Air!”, and turning away in disgust, she limped painfully back to wait outside of the closed door.  Here, when she had seated herself in a sagging chair, she lifted her bleak eyes to the smoke-stained ceiling, and repeated for the third time in a tone of profound contempt:  “Air!”

At the foot of the stairs, Corinna ran against Gideon Vetch.  “She died soon after you went out,” she said, “but Patty is still there.”

“I’ll go up to her,” he answered; and then as he placed his foot on the bottom step, he looked back at her, and added, “I tried to spare her this.”

She assented almost mechanically.  Fatigue had swept over her from head to foot like some sinister drug and she felt incapable of giving out anything, even sympathy, even the appearance of compassion.  “Then it is all true?” she asked.  “Patty is not your child?”

A shadow crossed his face, but he did not hesitate in his reply.  “I never had a child.  I was never married.”

“You took her like that—­because the mother was going to prison?”

He nodded.  “She was a child.  What difference did it make whether she was mine or not?  She was the nicest little thing you ever saw.  She is still.”

“Yes, she is still.  But you never knew what became of the mother?”

“I didn’t know her real name.  I didn’t want to.  The circus people called her Queenie, that was all I knew.  She’d stuck a knife into a man in a jealous rage, and he happened to die.  They said the trial would be obliged to go against her.  I was leaving California that night, and I brought the child with me.  I have never been back—­” He spread out his broad hand with a gesture that was strangely human.  “You would have done it in my place?”

She shook her head.  “No, I should have wanted to, but I couldn’t.  I am not big enough for that.”

He was already ascending the stairs, but at her words, he turned and smiled down on her.  “It was nothing to make a fuss about,” he said.  “Anybody would have done it.”

Then he mounted the stairs lightly for his great height, taking two steps at a time, while she passed out on the porch where Stephen was waiting for her.  As he rose wearily from the wicker rocking chair beside the empty perambulator, she felt as if he were a stranger.  In that one night she seemed to have put the whole universe between her and the old order that he represented.

“I kept my car waiting for you,” he began.  “It was better to let your man go home.”