why were he and Margaret different from the generations before them?  What variable strain in their natures impelled them to lead their own separate lives instead of the collective life of the family?  “I suppose Mother is right as far as she sees,” he admitted.  “To marry Margaret and settle down would be the best thing that could happen to me.”  Yet he had no sooner put the thought into words than the old feeling of suffocation rushed over him as if his hopes were smothered in ashes.

Yes, he would settle down, of course, but not now.  Next year perhaps, or the year after, he would sincerely fall in love with Margaret, and then everything would be different.

He was passing through the Square at the moment; and while he played with the idea of his marriage with Margaret, he found himself glancing expectantly at the car which was waiting in front of the Governor’s door.  “I wonder if she is going out,” he thought, while a superficial interest brightened the dull hours before him.  “It would be no more than she deserved if I were to go in and ask after her ankle.”  In obedience to the mocking impulse, he entered the gate and reached the steps just as Patty came out on the porch.  She was walking with ease, he noticed at once, and she wore again the red cape and the little hat with red wings.

“Oh,” she exclaimed, “it is you!”

“I stopped to ask after your ankle,” he retorted with ironic gaiety.  “I am glad it doesn’t keep you from walking.”

“That’s the new way of treating a sprain,” she replied calmly.  “Haven’t you heard of it?”

“Yes, I’ve heard of it.”  He glanced down at her stocking of thin gray silk.  “But I thought even then there were bandages.”

She smiled archly—­he felt that he wanted to slap her—­and glanced up at him with playful concern.  The gray-green rays were brighter in the daylight than he had remembered them and her mocking lips were the colour of cherries.  He thought of the thin pink curve of Margaret’s mouth and wondered if the war had corrupted his taste.

Yes, Margaret was womanly; she was well bred; she possessed every attribute that in theory he admired; yet she had never awakened this sparkling interest, this attraction which was pungently flavoured with surprise that he could be so strangely attracted.  He could gaze unmoved by the hour on Margaret’s smooth loveliness; but the tantalizing vision of this other girl’s face, of her cloudy black hair and her clear skin and her changeable eyes, with their misty gleam like a firefly lost in a spring marsh—­all these things were a part not of the tedious actuality, but of that hidden country of romance and adventure.  For the first time since his return from France, he was carried far outside of himself on the wave of an impulse; he was interested and excited.  Not for an instant did he imagine that he was falling in love.  His thoughts did not leave the immediate present when he was with her; and a part of the adventure was the feeling that each vivid moment he spent with her might be the last.  It was, he would have said had he undertaken to analyse the situation, merely an incident; but it was an incident that delighted him.  He knew nothing of Patty Vetch except that she charmed him against his will; and, for the moment at least, this was sufficient.