Patty’s eyes shone, but all she said was, “Oh, I’d love to!  It is so beautiful here.”

“Do you like it?” asked Corinna, and wondered how much the girl really saw.  Did she have the eyes and the soul to see and feel beauty?  “I have some good things at home.  You must come out there.”

“If you’ll only let me sit and watch you!” exclaimed Patty fervently.

“As long as you like.”  A smile crossed Corinna’s lips, as she imagined those large bright eyes, like stars in a spring twilight, shining on her hour after hour.  How could she possibly endure their unfaltering candour?  How could she adjust her life to their adoring regard?  “How long has your mother been dead, Patty?” she asked suddenly.  “Do you know—­of course you don’t—­scarcely anybody has ever heard it—­that I had a child once, a little girl, and she lived only one day.”

“And she might have been like you,” was all Patty said, but Corinna understood.

“Do you remember your mother, dear?”

“Only a little,” answered Patty, and then she told of the spangled skirt and the silver wand with the star on the end of it.  “That is all I can remember.”

She rose with a shy movement and held out her hand.  “Then I may come to-morrow?”

“Every day if you will, and most of all on the days when you need a friend.”  Bending her head, she kissed the girl lightly on the cheek.  “Do you like my cousin Stephen?” she asked suddenly.

A look of scorn came into Patty’s eyes.  “He is so superior,” she answered, with a gesture of complete indifference.  “I don’t like superior persons.”

“Ah,” thought Corinna, watching her closely, “she is really interested, poor child!”

After this the girl went out into a changed world—­into a world which had become, as if by a miracle, less impersonal and unfriendly.  The amber light of the sunset seemed to envelop her softly as if she were surrounded by happiness.  It was like first love without its troubled suspense, this new wonderful feeling!  It was like a religious awakening without the sense of sin that she associated with her early conversion.  Nothing, she felt, could ever be so beautiful again!  Nothing could ever mean so much to her in the rest of life!  In one moment, almost by magic, she had learned her first lesson in discrimination, in the relative values of experience; she had attained her first clear perception of the difference between the things that mattered a little and the things that mattered profoundly.

The every-day world had faded from her so completely that it seemed a natural incident—­it caused her scarcely a start of surprise—­when she met Stephen Culpeper under the Washington monument.  He had evidently just left his office, for there was a bulky package of papers in his hand; and he greeted her as if it were the merest accident that had taken him through the Square.  As a matter of fact it was less of an accident than he made it appear, for he had declined to go home in the Judge’s car because of some vague hope that by walking he might meet either Patty or Gideon Vetch.  Since the evening of the Berkeleys’ dinner the young man’s interest had shifted inexplicably from Patty to her father.