Outside the darkness was dissolving in a drab light which crept slowly up above the roofs of the houses; and while they waited this light filled the yard and the room and the passage beyond the door which Gideon Vetch had not closed.  Far away, through the heavy boughs of the ailantus tree, day was breaking in a glimmer of purple-few birds were twittering among the leaves.  Along the high brick wall a starved gray cat was stealing like a shadow.  Drawing her evening wrap closer about her bare shoulders, Corinna realized that it was already day in the street.

“She’s gone,” said the old hunchback, in a crooning whisper.  Her twisted hand was on the arm of the dead woman, which stretched as pallid and motionless as an arm of wax over the figured quilt.  “She’s gone, and she never knew that he had come.”  With a gesture that appeared as natural as the dropping of a leaf, she pressed down the eyelids over the expressionless eyes.  “Well, that’s the way life is, I reckon,” she remarked, as an epitaph over the obscure destiny of Mrs. Green.

“Yes, that’s the way life is,” repeated Corinna under her breath.  Already the old cripple had started about her inevitable ministrations:  but when Corinna tried to make Patty move away from the bedside, the girl shook her head in a stubborn refusal.

“I am trying to believe it,” she said.  “I am trying to believe it, and I can’t.”  Then she looked at them calmly and steadily.  “I want to think it out by myself,” she added.  “Would you mind leaving me alone in here for just a few 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?