Patricia had known Geraldine Leighton in a very slight and casual way, but with the word "dying," she became the heroic center of her hurrying thoughts. She saw her in the dim room with Doris and the nurse and doctor, each agonizingly intent on the slow, faltering heart-beats and the fitful, irregular breathing. As her swift mind galloped on to the end, and the subdued sounds of grief caught her inner ear, another face began to print itself rapidly on that quick-moving scene—Doris, white and haggard, looked into her eyes, and she felt her whole heart go out to her.
Griffin was just ending the sentence that had hurried the fleeting pictures through her mind when Patricia slipped away unnoticed into the hall, where she flung on a cape and soft hat of Judith's and softly let herself out.
The Leighton house was a big dark pile at the end of the street and the only light visible was in the back room where Patricia knew the struggle against death and disease was being fought out. She paused for a long look and then she ran lightly up the steps and put a shrinking finger on the bell.
It seemed an eternity till the door was grudgingly opened and a white-faced, gruff boy asked unrecognizingly what she wanted.
Patricia put her questions tremblingly, for she feared the stern, strange face of the boy in knickerbockers. She had seen him playing and shouting in the square on other days, and the change was so great that she felt death alone could have wrought it. But he answered evenly that 'Geraldine was just the same,' and was closing the door when Patricia stopped him. After a hasty parley, on his part, at first stubborn and then yielding, the door closed and Patricia, with beating heart, ran down the steps and hurried to the side of the house where the long windows of the drawing room protruded their iron balconies over the sidewalk.
Here she waited in the shadow of the fluttering violet arc light, with her eyes fastened to the silent, insensible windows. Ten minutes that seemed ten eternities went lagging by. Tears of disappointment rose to Patricia's eyes and she shivered as the gusts of west wind flung the drops from the saturated trees in a silver shower across the darkened panes.
"I'll count ten, and then I'll go," she said to herself.
The windows remained dark, and the only sounds on the quiet side street were the wind in the wet trees and the sizzle of the arc light above her head.
"Five, six, sev——"
She sprang forward as the second window slowly moved and a muffled figure stood on the balcony.