ew minutes?"

Though there was no grief in her voice--how could there be any grief,
Corinna asked herself?--there was an accent of profound surprise and
incredulity, as of one who has looked for the first time on death.
Standing there in her spring-like dress beside the dead woman who had
been her mother, Corinna felt intuitively that Patty had left her
girlhood behind her. The child had lived in one night through an inner
crisis, through a period of spiritual growth, which could not be
measured by years. Whatever she became in the future, she would never be
again the Patty Vetch that Corinna and Stephen had known.

Yes, she had a right to be alone. Beckoning to the old woman to follow
her, Corinna went out softly, closing the door after her.

CHAPTER XXIII

THE DAWN

Outside in the narrow passage, smelling of dust and yesterday's cooking,
the pallid light filtered in through the closed window; and it seemed to
Corinna that this light pervaded her own thoughts until the images in
her mind moved in a procession of stark outlines against a colourless
horizon. In this unreal world, which she knew was merely a distorted
impression of the external world about her, she saw the figure of the
dead woman, still and straight as the effigy of a saint, the twisted
shape of the old hunchback, and after these the shadow of the starved
cat stealing along the top of the high brick wall. What was the meaning
in these things? Where was the beauty? What inscrutable purpose, what
sardonic humour, joined together beauty and ugliness, harmony and
discord, her own golden heritage with the drab destinies of that dead
woman and this work-worn cripple?

"I can't stand it any longer," she thought. "I must breathe the open
air, or I shall die."

Then, just as she was about to hurry toward the stairs, she checked
herself and stood still because she realized that the old woman had
followed her and was droning into her ear.

"Yes, ma'am, that's the way life is," the impersonal voice was
muttering, "but it ain't the only way that it is, I reckon. I sees so
many sick and dying folks that you'd think I was obliged to look at
things unnatural-like. But I don't, not me, ma'am. It ain't all that
way, with nothing but waiting and wanting, and then disappointment. Even
Maggie had her good times somewhere in the past. You can't expect to be
always dressed in spangles and riding bareback, that's what I used to
say to her. You've got to take y