I'll do anything in the world that I can for you, Patty, anything in the world." As the car rolled through the gate and down the wide drive to the Washington monument, Patty stood gazing after it, with a burning moisture in her eyes and a lump in her throat.

Terror had seized her in an instant, terror of unhappiness, of missing the one thing in life on which she had passionately set her heart.

What had Mrs.Page meant by her questions?
Had she intended them as a warning?
And why should she have thought it necessary to warn her against caring too much for Stephen?
The girl had started to enter the house when, remembering suddenly that Gershom was still there, she turned hurriedly away from the door, and walked back down the brick pavement to the fountain beyond the library.
The squirrels still scampered over the walk; the thirsty sparrows were still drinking; the few loungers on the benches still stared at her with dull and incurious eyes.

Not a cloud stained the intense blue of the sky; and over the bright grass on the hillside the sunshine quivered like an immense swarm of bees.
As she approached the fountain where she had first met Stephen, it seemed to her that a romantic light, a visionary enchantment, fell over this one spot of ground, and divided it by some magic circle from every other place in the world.

The crude iron railing, the bare gravel, the ugly spouting fountain which was stripped of every leaf or blade of grass--these things appeared to her through an indescribable glamour, as if they stood there as the visible gateway to some invisible garden of dreams.