“A few months,” he said slowly, “and nothing accomplished that one can point out and say that we owe directly to him.  Yet I doubt if a single one of us will ever forget him.  I doubt if a single one of us will ever be exactly, in every little way, just what we should have been if we had never known Vetch, or spoken to him.  The merest ripple of change, perhaps, but it counts—­it counts because in touching him we touched a humanity that is as rare as genius itself.”  Yet they had killed him, Corinna knew, because they could not understand him!

For a moment there was silence, and then Stephen spoke in a whisper:  “There are some things that you can’t see until you stand far enough away from them.  I doubt if any of us really saw him until to-night.  To-morrow he will begin to live.”  As he lifted his eyes to Corinna’s face, she saw in them a fidelity that pledged itself to the future.

“Go to Patty,” she whispered.  “Go to her and repeat what you have said to us.”  Putting her hand on his arm, she led him into the room where the girl was kneeling, and then drew back while he went quickly forward.  Watching from the threshold, she saw Patty look up uncertainly, and rise slowly from the floor where she had been kneeling; she saw Stephen put out his arms with a movement of love and pity; and she saw the girl hesitate for an instant, and then turn to his clasp as a hurt child turns for comfort.  That was youth, that was the future, thought Corinna, and closing the door softly, she left them together.  Yes, youth was for the future, and for herself, she realized with a pang, were the things that she had never had in the past.  Only the things that she had never had were really hers!  Only the unfulfilled, she saw in that moment of illuminating insight, is the permanent.

Passing the group in the hall, she went out on the porch, and looked with swimming eyes over the fountain into the Square.  Beyond the white streams of electricity and the black patterns of the shadows, she saw the sharp outlines of the city, and beyond that the immense blue field of the sky sown thickly with stars.  Life was there—­life that embraced success and failure, illusion and disillusion, birth and death.  In the morning she would go back to it—­she would begin again—­in the morning she would will herself to pick up the threads of middle age as lightly as Stephen and Patty would pick up the threads of youth.  To-morrow she would start living again—­but to-night for a few hours she would rest from life; she would look back now, as she had looked back that morning, to where a man was standing in the bright grass with the sunrise above his head.

BOOKS BY ELLEN GLASGOW

   Life and Gabriella

   One man in his time

   Phases of an inferior Planet

   The ancient law

   The battle-ground

   The builders