It was the seventeenth of October. It was also Petra’s birthday; and Lewis had relaxed in his practice of turning down all Mrs. Lowell Farwell’s invitations and was now driving out to Green Doors to a dinner party given in honor of the birthday. Himself, Dick and the Allens were to be the only guests. Neil McCloud had been invited but was, Lewis understood, not coming. Lewis suspected that Neil’s refusal had been the cause of Petra’s manner to-day—not a birthday manner exactly. She had moved about at her work in a spirit of recollection, but a strained, anxious recollection which no doubt she thought went unnoticed by her employer. Lewis had first been struck by it when he asked her who was coming to her party to-night, and her answer had been that Neil was not. He had laughed and said, “But it was a list of acceptances I wanted—not refusals.” She had lifted her eyes to his, at that,—she was sitting at her desk and he had stopped by it as he passed through to his own office to say good morning—and they had been blank with a kind of subdued misery. But she had answered, “Clare tells me that you are coming, Doctor Pryne. The Allens. Dick. It is nice of you to have accepted.”

“Don’t say that. I am looking forward to it very much. My dear, will you accept this present? I’ve been days finding it, and if you don’t like it I shall be terribly disconcerted.”

It was the detail from the Fra Angelico picture: angels dancing, and saints embracing in a flower-studded meadow. A very good print, framed in silver. Lewis had brought the cumbersome thing under his arm, done up in brown paper, just as it had been sent to him from the store. Lewis did not hope, of course, that Petra would ever know why he had hit upon this particular present. It seemed inappropriate, perhaps, for a twenty-year-old girl’s birthday present. But to Lewis it meant something they had once experienced together—a meeting of souls where language and explanations are no longer necessary, where all is unselfconscious joy, camaraderie and fluent communication between the saints in Paradise. That first sight of the June meadow behind Clare’s guest house, which Lewis had likened to this picture—and thought of Petra and himself as saints, without their crowns to be sure, and their presence there in the paradisiacal meadow purest accident—had remained all summer a poignant memory. He hoped that Petra would keep this picture all her life, wherever she lived, and that even not understanding anything of what it meant to him in the giving, she would remember him now and then in looking at it; and thus his memory would stay alive for her because of something which stood to him for their own one brief real meeting and recognition. Let that same quality of recognition never come again on this earth,—still it might yet come in heaven. Perhaps it only needed their crowns for the consummation of its promise.

An early frost had followed the unprecedentedly hot summer, and the trees all along the state highway to Meadowbrook had been stripped during the past few days of their flaming foliage. The fields and meadows stretched away brown and purple, barren too. But the clouds, like levitated mountain ranges, hung above the western horizon, blazing with autumn colors, red, gold, purple, buff. The day had had an Indian summer warmth over it and to-night the sky promised to be divinely clear with a full moon.

Lewis had sent Petra home from the office when she returned from her lunch. “Somehow you don’t look like a party to-day,” he had said. “Lie out in the sun on a blanket somewhere. It’s warm enough. Get rested. This has been a heavy week.” Miss Frazier was away on the vacation she had insisted on putting off until the book was actually in print and Petra really had been working up to the full capacity of her strength and ability.

If Lewis had not packed Petra off early, however, she would be beside him now in his rushing car, sharing the beauty of those levitated cloud-mountains along with him, and the bare tracery of tree branches against the mellowed fields. He had had a selfish impulse to keep her late just to make this drive together inevitable. And he would have succumbed to his selfishness, had he not a better plan. Neil was not to be there to-night. Whether Dick was absolutely out of the running or not Lewis did not actually know. But Lewis had reached his limit of passive endurance. He had accepted the invitation because in the very act of reading Clare’s note a few days ago, tending it, he had made up his mind that he would go with Petra by moonlight to the edge of that meadow (October now, not June, but in the moonlight it would still be Paradise) and tell her how he wanted her. If she was in love with Neil—and he knew, of course, that she was—it did not matter. He wanted Petra at last even if she came to him with a broken heart. It had taken Lewis weeks to reach this depth of humility. But now it was reached. He had struck bottom in his longing and suffering. If Petra in youth’s scorn of compromises said that she had nothing she could give him, let it be so. At least, he would have reached for his star. But if he did not touch the sky to-night, did not draw it down to him, he must find Petra another job at once. It was impossible to have her in his office, feeling as he felt, longer.

At its very least, Lewis’ proposal would have the advantage of making Petra see the necessity for her not going on at his office. She would understand and not be wounded. And he would find her something even better. In spite of the “depression” and Petra’s lack of business experience, he promised himself—and he would promise her—that she should not be the loser. In fact, all Lewis honestly hoped of this onrushing moonlight night was for an understanding between himself and Petra. A bitter understanding on his side—since she was going to tell him that she could not possibly marry him without loving him—but on hers illuminating. She would not go on, after to-night, so dangerously unconscious of the power of her young beauty and loveliness.

Remembering her letter to Dick two months ago down at Northeast—and when had Lewis forgotten it for a single hour!—he trusted Petra’s ability to face things squarely, once they were given her to face. She had a clear, honest mind. She had been clear and honest with Dick. Lewis would now, to-night, by moonlight, on the edge of the Paradise meadow, be equally clear and honest with her.

The car reached sixty-nine on the clear-ahead highway, and the lines of Petra’s brave letter streaked through Lewis’ mind with almost a like speed. He knew it by heart from the one reading—that brave, dear letter to another man:

Dear Dick:

I am deeply sorry about the way I treated you last night. I have gotten up before dawn, Dick, to tell you how miserably sorry I am. Or I suppose it is really dawn, for all the east is red and purple. I am writing on Father’s desk in the library. Everybody is asleep. But I haven’t slept. I have been sitting up in bed all night, thinking of my cruelty to you. You see, this is the way it was, Dick. When you kissed me like that, it was really just as if somebody passing me in the street had kissed me. I mean it was as unexpected as that. My only feeling was terror. That is why I struck out like that—just as you would in the dark, if something strange were striking at you. You’d strike back. Besides, no one has ever kissed me before. Not like that, I mean. No one has ever been in love with me before. And you see, anyway, I have thought right along—never thought anything else—that you came to Green Doors on Clare’s account. It was Clare you always talked to. I didn’t know you even looked at me. This may seem strange to you, Dick. Now I see that thinking that was pretty stupid. You have been shy with me—just as one is toward somebody one really loves. Clare has explained it. She came out on the terrace right after you went. I was crying. She found out what was the matter. And she showed me how cruel and stupid I had been. I know now that it was a great honor you did me in asking me to marry you, Dick. To love somebody like that and tell them so and have them do what I did—strike out at you like a serpent—must have been too terrible. The blow on your face was nothing to the blow on your heart, I know. But now I am cool and all night I have been thinking. It isn’t just because Clare says so but now I feel myself how I owe you a deep apology. And I am going to tell you why, even if I hadn’t hated your kissing me the way you did, I would still have said the same thing, that I couldn’t feel toward you as you do toward me. You asked me, you know, if there was anybody else. If I was engaged. I told you no. Well, that was true. Of course I am not engaged. But now I am going to tell you something to prove how sorry I am I treated you as I did last night and to show you how I trust you—and how fond I am of you really, now that I see things about you and Clare in a truer light than I have been seeing them. It is this, Dick. I am not engaged, and I am not likely to be. But I love some one terribly. I love him the way you love me, I guess. But he doesn’t love me any more than I love you. So that makes things even between us, Dick, doesn’t it? Don’t tell Clare this, of course. Or any one. I have told you to even things up, and to make you see that if I have hurt your pride terribly, and been cruel to you, the same thing has been done to me. All I said to Clare last night was that I should write to you and apologize and beg you to go on being friends and not stop coming to Green Doors. Clare and Father will miss you, Dick, if you stay away, and believe it or not, I think I shall too. I don’t know how I ever behaved so brutally as I did last night, but I am always making mistakes and doing terrible things. Please burn this letter.

Affectionately—truly—Petra.

When Lewis looked up from that letter, Dick had said quickly, “It isn’t McCloud, Lewis! Don’t think it for a minute. Anybody can see how he feels about Petra. She could have him if she wanted him. It’s written all over him. It’s you she means, Lewis. You. Nobody else.”

Lewis had said, “Damn you, Dick!” and then no more. He had held Dick to their bargain from that minute, not to discuss Petra or anybody at Green Doors ever again. He had seen to it that Dick did burn the letter as Petra had asked. And as it charred and went up in a hot blaze between the logs, Lewis had not reached his hand to rescue it. He had clenched his hands instead, while his heart burned to a white heat and then withered into charred nothingness with the letter. In that minute Lewis had hated Dick almost as much as Clare. What had they tried to do, between them, to this poor baffled child! Of course it was Neil she meant. Poor Petra! And of course Neil did want her every bit as much as she wanted him. But there was the man’s living faith—the faith neither Clare nor Dick could comprehend as a reality—which stood between him and Petra, forbidding them to each other.

Only now, after weeks of thinking and watching, had Lewis come to think that it would be best for both Neil and Petra if Petra could bring herself to accept half a loaf from life, and marry himself, if she could care for him even a little. For she was created and designed for giving—for motherhood, wifehood. And Lewis loved her with such utter abandonment! Mightn’t the strength and truth of his love ultimately force a response almost in kind?

Lewis had little hope that this was even a possibility. But he had said his prayer—Neil’s prayer, rather—the only one Lewis had ever learned to pray. He was saying it now, as he drew more slowly into Meadowbrook’s environs. His nephews were expecting a romp with Lewis to-night before their supper. Then he would be changing into evening clothes at the Allens’, for Petra’s dinner, and would return there to sleep.

“Yes,” he assured himself, driving slowly and more slowly, “I shall lose her forever to-night—or gain the chance of beginning to win her.” He had decided to tell her that he had read her letter to Dick down at Northeast and how innocent Dick had been in letting him.

“Dick, you see,” Lewis would say to Petra, “simply thought he was fixing things up between you and me without making us wait for the last chapter! He thought in all honesty it was I, not Neil, you meant in that letter. Of course, I knew better.... But Petra, it isn’t broken hearts that make for ruin and unhappiness in lives. Not ultimately, anyway. It is broken faiths. Neil stayed away to-night—don’t you suppose—because of something dearer to him than mere happiness. Something more blessed than happiness.” That was part of what Lewis would say to her. And then, if they kissed—if she let him kiss her there to-night on the edge of the Paradise meadow—

Well! Lewis’ hope, though small, pierced his heart like a sword.