The house had become very still.  While Corinna waited there at Patty’s side, the only noise came from the restless movement of the city, which sounded far off and vaguely ominous, like the disturbance in a nightmare from which one has just awakened.  She had turned off the unshaded electric light; and for a few minutes Patty knelt alone in a merciful dimness, which left her white dress and the composed features of the dead man the only luminous spots in the room.  It was as if these two pallid spaces were living things in the midst of inanimate darkness.  For a moment only this impression lasted, for overcome by the pathos of it, Corinna crossed the room with noiseless footsteps and lighted the wax candles on the mantelpiece.

Death had come so suddenly that, lying there in the trembling light of the candles, Vetch appeared to be merely resting a moment in his energetic career.  His rugged features still wore their look of exuberant vitality, of triumphant faith.  There was about him even in death the radiance of his indestructible illusion.  As Corinna looked down on him, it seemed incredible to her that he should not stretch himself in a moment, and rise and go out again into the struggle of living.  It seemed incredible that his work should be finished for ever when he was still so unspent, so full of tireless activity.  Was death always like this—­a victory of material and mechanical forces?  An accident, an automatic gesture, and the complex power which stood for the soul of Gideon Vetch was dissolved—­or released.  The crumbling of a rock, the falling of a leaf!  Her eyes left the face of the dead man, left Patty’s bowed head at her side, and travelled beyond the open window into the glamour and mystery of the night, and beyond the night into the sky—­

There was a knock at the door, and she turned away and went out to join the men in the hall.  What had it meant to them, she wondered.  How much had they understood?  How much had they ever understood of that symbol of a changing world which they had loved and hated under the name of Gideon Vetch?

“Give her a few minutes more,” she said.  “Leave her alone with him.”

There were four men waiting—­her father, Stephen, old Darrow, and Julius Gershom—­and these four, she felt, were the men who had known Vetch best, and who, with the exception of Darrow, had perhaps understood least what he meant.  No one had understood him, least of all, she saw now, had she herself understood him—­

Gershom spoke first.  “He was the biggest man we’ve ever had,” he said, “and we never doubted it—­” Yet he had never for an instant, Corinna knew, seen Vetch as he really was, or recognized the end for which he was fighting.

“He was the only one who could have held us together,” sighed old Darrow, and his face looked as if a searing iron had passed over it.  “This will put us back at least fifty years—­”

The Judge was gazing through the open door out into the night, where lamps shone in the Square and a luminous cloud hung over the city, that city which was outgrowing its youth, outgrowing the barriers of tradition, outgrowing alike the forces of reaction and the forces of progress.