"I am glad you haven't changed.... Why, but of course! Nothing would have counted if you had changed--not even for the better, Patricia. For you and what you meant to me were real. That only was real--that we, not being demigods, but being just what we were, once climbed together very high, where we could glimpse the stars--and nothing else can ever be of any importance. What we inherited was too much for us, was it not, my dear? And now it is not formidable any longer. Oh, but I loved you very greatly, Patricia! And now at last, my dear, I seem to understand--as in that old, old time when you and I were glad together----" But he did not say this aloud, for it seemed to him that he stood in a cool, pleasant garden, and that Patricia came toward him through the long shadows of sunset. The lacy folds and furbelows and semi-transparencies that clothed her were now tinged with gold and now, as a hedge or a flower bed screened her from the level rays, were softened into multitudinous graduations of grays and mauves and violets. They did not speak. But in her eyes he found compassion and such tenderness as awed him; and then, as a light is puffed out, they were the eyes of a friendly stranger. He understood, for an instant, that of necessity it was decreed time must turn back and everything, even Rudolph Musgrave, be just as it had been when he first saw Patricia. For they had made nothing of their lives; and so, they must begin all over again. "_Failure is not permitted_" he was saying.... "_You're Cousin Rudolph, aren't you?_" she asked.... And Rudolph Musgrave knew he had forgotten something of vast import, but what this knowledge had pertained to he no longer knew. Then Rudolph Musgrave noted, with a delicious tingling somewhere about his heart, that her hair was like the reflection of a sunset in rippling waters--only many times more beautiful, of course--and that her mouth was an inconsiderable trifle, a scrap of sanguine curves, and that her eyes were purple glimpses of infinity. THE END End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck by James Branch Cabell