"Is he bringing the child?"
"She is already here. Can't you see her there at the foot of the bed?"
The large black eyes, drained of any human expression, turned slowly toward the figure of Patty.
"But she is a little thing," said the woman doubtfully. "She is not three years old yet. What has he done with her? He told me that he would take care of her as if she belonged to him."
The old hunchback, bending her inscrutable face, screamed again into the ear on the pillow.
"That was near sixteen years ago, Maggie," she said. "Have you forgotten?"
The woman closed her eyes wearily. "Yes, I had forgotten," she answered. "Time goes so."
But it appeared to Corinna, sitting there, with her eyes on the strip of sky which was visible through the window, that time would never go on. A pitiless fact was breaking into her understanding, shattering wall after wall of incredulity, of conviction that such a thing was too terrible to be true. She longed to get Patty away; but when she urged her in a whisper to go downstairs, the girl only shook her head, without moving her eyes from the haggard face on the pillow. The minutes dragged by like hours while they waited there, in hushed suspense, for they scarcely knew what. Outside in the backyard, the flowering ailantus tree shed a disagreeable odour; downstairs the feeble crying, which had stopped for a little while, was beginning again. While she remained motionless at the foot of the bed, wild and rebellious thoughts flocked through Corinna's mind. If she had only held back that message! If she had only kept Patty away until it was too late! She thought of the girl a few hours ago, flushed with happiness, dancing under the swinging garlands of flowers, to the sound of that thunderous music. Dancing there, with the restless pleasure of youth, while in another street, so far away that it might have been in a distant city, in a different world even, this woman, with the face of tragedy, lay dying with that fretful wail in her ears. A different world it might have been, and yet what divided her from this other woman except the blind decision of chance, the difference between beauty and ugliness, nothing more. In this dingy room, smelling of dust and drugs and the heavy odour of the ailantus tree, she felt a presence more profoundly real, more poignantly significant, than any material forms—the presence of those elemental forces which connect time with eternity. This little room, within its partial shadow, like the shadow of time itself, was touched with the solemnity of a cathedral. It seemed to Corinna, with her imaginative love of life, that a window into experience had opened sharply, a wall had crumbled. For the first time she understood that the innumerable and intricate divisions of human fate are woven into a single tremendous design.
While they waited there in silence the hours dragged on like years. At last the woman appeared to sleep, and when she opened her eyes again, her gaze had become clear and lucid.
"Have you sent for them?" she asked.