he Square at the moment; and while he played
with the idea of his marriage with Margaret, he found himself glancing
expectantly at the car which was waiting in front of the Governor's
door. "I wonder if she is going out," he thought, while a superficial
interest brightened the dull hours before him. "It would be no more than
she deserved if I were to go in and ask after her ankle." In obedience
to the mocking impulse, he entered the gate and reached the steps just
as Patty came out on the porch. She was walking with ease, he noticed at
once, and she wore again the red cape and the little hat with red wings.

"Oh," she exclaimed, "it is you!"

"I stopped to ask after your ankle," he retorted with ironic gaiety. "I
am glad it doesn't keep you from walking."

"That's the new way of treating a sprain," she replied calmly. "Haven't
you heard of it?"

"Yes, I've heard of it." He glanced down at her stocking of thin gray
silk. "But I thought even then there were bandages."

She smiled archly--he felt that he wanted to slap her--and glanced up at
him with playful concern. The gray-green rays were brighter in the
daylight than he had remembered them and her mocking lips were the
colour of cherries. He thought of the thin pink curve of Margaret's
mouth and wondered if the war had corrupted his taste.

Yes, Margaret was womanly; she was well bred; she possessed every
attribute that in theory he admired; yet she had never awakened this
sparkling interest, this attraction which was pungently flavoured with
surprise that he could be so strangely attracted. He could gaze unmoved
by the hour on Margaret's smooth loveliness; but the tantalizing vision
of this other girl's face, of her cloudy black hair and her clear skin
and her changeable eyes, with their misty gleam like a firefly lost in a
spring marsh--all these things were a part not of the tedious actuality,
but of that hidden country of romance and adventure. For the first time
since his return from France, he was carried far outside of himself on
the wave of an impulse; he was interested and excited. Not for an
instant did he imagine that he was falling in love. His thoughts did not
leave the immediate present when he was with her; and a part of the
adventure was the feeling that each vivid moment he spent with her might
be the last. It was, he would have said had he undertaken to analyse the
situation, merely an incident; but it was an incident that delighted
him. He knew