“Patricia!”

Instantly she stopped crying.

“Who is that?” she said, with an astonishing control of her voice.  “Is that you, Alan?  I’m all right, dear.  Did I frighten you?  Is that you, Alan?”

“It’s Paul,” the boy said, coming nearer.

“Oh—­Paul!” she said, relieved.  “Does Alan know I’m here?”

“No,” he reassured her; then, affectionately:  “What is it, Pat?”

“Just—­just that I happen to be a fool!” she said huskily, but with an effort at lightness.  Paul sat down, beginning to see in the darkness.  “I’m all right now,” went on Patricia, hardily.  “I just—­I suppose I just had the blues.”  She put out a smooth hand in the darkness, and patted Paul’s appreciatively.  “I’m ashamed of myself!” said she, catching a little sob, as she spoke, like a child.

“Bad news—­in your letters?” he hazarded.

“No, good; that’s the trouble!” she said, with her whimsical smile, but with trembling lips.  “You see, all my friends are in the East, and some of them happened to be at the same house-party at Newport, and they—­they were saying how they missed me,” her voice shook a little, “and—­and it seems they toasted me, all standing, and—­and—­ " And suddenly she gave up the fight for control, and began to cry bitterly again.  “Oh, I’m so homesick!” she sobbed, “and I’m so lonesome!  And I’m so sick, sick, sick of this place!  Oh, I think I’ll go crazy if I can’t go home!  I bear it and I bear it,” said Patricia, in a sort of desperate self-defence, “and then the time comes when I simply can’t bear it!” And again she wept luxuriously, and Paul, in an agony of sympathy, patted her hand.

“My heart is just breaking!” she burst out again, her tears and words tumbling over each other.  “It—­it isn’t right!  I want my friends, and I want my youth—­I’ll never be twenty-six again!  I want to put my things into a suit-case and go off with the other girls for country visits—­and I want to dance!” She put her head down again, and after a moment Paul ventured a timid, “Patricia, dear, don’t.”

He thought she had not heard him, but after a moment, he was relieved to see her resolutely straighten up again, and dry her eyes, and push up her tumbled hair.

“Well, I really will stop,” she said determinedly.  “This will not do!  If Alan even suspected!  But, you see, I’m naturally a sociable person, and I had—­well, I don’t suppose any girl ever had such a good time in New York!  My aunt did for me just what she did for her own daughters—­a dance at Sherry’s, and dinners—!  Paul, I’d give a year of my life just to drive down the Avenue again on a spring afternoon, and bow to every one, and have tea somewhere, and smell the park—­oh, did you ever smell Central Park in the spring?”

Both were silent.  After a long pause Paul said: 

“Why do you stay?  You’ve not got to ask a stepfather for a job.”