and pleasant magic. The other was real life--life for all but the happy
few, he found himself thinking--this was merely the enchanted fairy-ring
where children played at making believe.

"I hoped I'd catch you," he said, stretching out his hands to the log
fire. "I felt somehow that you hadn't gone, late as it is." While he
spoke he was thinking, not of Corinna, but of the strange woman he had
left in the Square. Queer how that incident had bitten into his mind.
Try as he might he couldn't shake himself free from it.

"Father is going to some dreadful public dinner," answered Corinna. "I
stayed with him here so he wouldn't have to wait at the club. It won't
matter about me. The car is coming for me, and I don't dine until eight.
Stay awhile and we'll talk," she added with her cheerful smile. "I
haven't seen you for ages, and you look as if you had something to tell
me."

"I have," he said; and then he turned from her to the two old men who
were talking drowsily in voices that sounded as far off to Stephen as
the murmuring of bees in summer meadows. He knew that it was real, that
it was the life he had always lived, and yet he couldn't get rid of the
feeling that Corinna and the two old men and the charming surroundings
were all part of a play, and that in a little while he should go out of
the theatre and step back among the sordid actualities.

"The General and I are having our little chat before dinner," said Judge
Page, a sufficiently ornamental old gentleman to have decorated any
world or any fireside--imposing and distinguished as a portrait by Sir
Thomas Lawrence, with a crown of silvery hair and the shining dark eyes
of his daughter. He still carried himself, for all his ironical comment,