He stood a second studying her face, for his happiness grew upon him slowly. But behind the crooked smile which was half-hidden from him, he caught the dawn of a new light that he understood. He took her in his arms then, and wondered how it was that he had not kissed her when her lips had been so close before. But the new wonder that came to them both made them willing to forget that there had ever been anything else before. Later, Ross, unable to credit his good fortune and marveling at the intricacies of the feminine mind, asked her a question. Her reply caused him more amazement: "Poor, foolish, Slovenly Peter! I saw it by accident in the mirror a week ago." So it was Mortimer Crabb after all who made the opportunity; for Miss Darrow smilingly admitted that had it not been for his abrupt entrance at that precise psychological moment, she should now have been in Aiken and Ross on the way to the Antipodes. But Patricia was doubly happy; for had she not circumvented her own husband in opening the studio he had forsworn, the veritable chamber of Bluebeard which had been bolted against her? Had she not browsed away among the gods of his youth to her heart's content and made that sacred apartment the vestibule of Paradise for at least two discontented mortals whose hearts were now beating as one? CHAPTER XV After this first success, Patricia was filled with the spirit of altruism, and winter and summer went out upon the highways and byways seeking the raw material for her fateful loom. She was Puck, Portia and Patricia all rolled into one. There were Stephen Ventnor and Jack Masters, whom she still saw occasionally, but they only sighed and even refused to dine at the Castle of Enchantment. She thought sometimes of Heywood Pennington, too, and often found herself wondering how the world was faring with him, hoping that some day chance would throw him in her way. The old romance was dead, of course. But what an opportunity for regeneration!