"Patty!" called Corinna's voice. "Patty, dear, I am looking for you." Corinna, in her rustling white and silver brocade, stepped from the French window out on the porch. "Some one has sent for you—your aunt, I think they said, who is dying—"
The girl started and drew back. Her face changed, while the light faded from her eyes until they became wells of darkness. "I know," she answered. "I must go. I promised that I would go."
"My car is waiting. I will take you," said Corinna.
She turned to enter the house, and Patty, without so much as a look at Stephen's face, went slowly after her.
CHAPTER XXII
THE NIGHT
As the car passed through the deserted streets, Corinna placed her hand on Patty's with a reassuring pressure. Without appearing to do so, she was studying the girl's soft profile, now flashing out in a sudden sharp light, now melting back again into the vagueness of the shadows. What was there about this girl, Corinna asked herself, which appealed so strongly to the protective impulse in her heart? Was it because this undisciplined child, with that curious sporting instinct which supplied the place of Victorian morality, represented for her, as well as for Stephen, some inarticulate longing for the unknown, for the adventurous? Did Patty's charm for them both lie in her unlikeness to everything they had known in the past? In Corinna, as in Stephen, two opposing spirits had battled unceasingly, the realistic spirit which accepted life as it was, and the romantic spirit which struggled toward some unattainable perfection, which endeavoured to change and decorate the actuality. More than Stephen, perhaps, she had faced life; but she had not accepted it without rebellion. She had learned from disappointment to see things as they are; but deep in her heart some unspent fire of romance, some imprisoned esthetic impulse, sought continually to gild and enrich the experience of the moment. And this girl, so young, so ingenuous, so gallant and so appealing, stood in Corinna's mind for the poetic wildness of her spirit, for all that she had seen in a vision and had missed in reality.
When the car reached the Square, it turned sharply north. Sometimes it passed through lighted spaces and sometimes through pools of darkness; and as it went on rapidly, it seemed to Corinna that it was the one solid fact in a night that she imagined. Patty was very still; but Corinna felt the warm clasp of her hand, and heard her soft breathing, which became a part of the muffled undercurrent of the sleeping city. In all those closely packed houses, where the obscurity was broken here and there by a lighted window, other human beings were breathing, sleeping, dreaming, like Patty and herself, of some impractical and visionary to-morrow. Of something which had never been, but still might be! Of something which they had just missed, but might find when the sun rose again! Of a miracle that might occur at any moment and make everything different! It was after midnight; and to Corinna it seemed that the darkness had released the collective spirit of the city, which would retreat again into itself with the breaking of dawn. Once a cry sounded far off and was hushed almost immediately; once a light flashed and went out in the window beneath a roof; but as the car sped on by rows of darkened tenements, the mysterious penumbra of the night appeared to draw closer and closer, as if that also were a phantom of the encompassing obscurity.
"Is this the aunt you told me of, Patty?" asked Corinna abruptly.