She did not go to the other tea. All day she had lived in a dream, doing that which was required of her and doing it well. But from now until the time that she must go home and dress for dinner, she would give herself up to thoughts of Roger Poole.

She turned down Connecticut Avenue, and walking lightly and quickly came at last to the old church, where all her life she had worshiped. At this hour there was no service, and she knelt for a moment, then sat back in her pew, glad of the sense of absolute immunity from interruption.

And as she sat there in the stillness, one sentence from his letter stood out.

"And now what meaning for me had the candles on the altar, what meaning the voices in the choir? I had sung, too, in the light of the candles, but it was ordained that my voice must be forever still."

This to Mary was the great tragedy—his loss of courage, his loss of faith—his acceptance of a passive future. Resolutely she had conquered all the shivering agony which had swept over her as she had read of that sordid marriage and its sequence. Resolutely she had risen above the faintness which threatened to submerge her as the whole of that unexpected history was presented to her; resolutely she had fought against a pity which threatened to overwhelm her.

Resolutely she had made herself face with clear eyes the conclusion; life had been too much for him and he had surrendered to fate.

To say that his letter in its personal relation to herself had not thrilled her would be to underestimate the warmth of her friendship for him; if there was more than friendship, she would not admit it. There had been a moment when, shaken and stirred by his throbbing words, she had laid down his letter and had asked herself, palpitating, "has love come to me—at last?" But she had not answered it. She knew that she would never answer it until Roger Poole found a meaning in life which was, as yet, hidden from him.

But how could she best help him to find that meaning? Dimly she felt that it was to be through her that he would find it. And he was going away. And before he went, she must light for him some little beacon of hope.

It was dark in the church now except for the candle on the altar.

She knelt once more and hid her face in her hands. She had the simple faith of a child, and as a child she had knelt in this same pew and had asked confidently for the things she desired, and she had believed that her prayers would be answered.

It was late when she left the church. And she was late in getting home. All the lower part of the house was lighted, but there was no light in the Tower Rooms. Roger, who dined down-town, would not come until they were on their way to Mrs. Bigelow's.

As she passed through the garden, she saw that on a bush near the fountain bloomed a late rose. She stooped and picked it, and flitting in the dusk down the path, she entered the door which led to the Tower stairway.

And when, an hour later, Roger Poole came into the quiet house, weary and worn from the strain of a day in which he had tried to read his letter with Mary's eyes, he found his room dark, except for the flicker of the fire.

Feeling his way through the dimness, he pulled at last the little chain of the electric lamp on his table. The light at once drew a circle of gold on the dark dull oak. And within that circle he saw the answer to his letter.

Wide open and illumined, lay John Ballard's old Bible. And across the pages, fresh and fragrant as the friendship which she had given him, was the late rose which Mary had picked in the garden.



CHAPTER XII

In Which Mary and Roger Have Their Hour; and in Which a Tea-Drinking Ends in What Might Have Been a Tragedy.

To Mary, possessed and swayed by the letter which she had received from Roger, it seemed a strange thing that the rest of the world moved calmly and unconsciously forward.

The letter had come to her on Saturday. On Sunday morning everybody went to church. Everybody dined afterward, unfashionably, at two o'clock, and later everybody motored out to the Park.

That is, everybody but Mary!

She declined on the ground of other things to do.

"There'll be five of you anyhow with Aunt Frances and Grace," she said, "and I'll have tea for you when you come back."

So Constance and Gordon and Aunt Isabelle had gone off, and with Barry at Leila's, Mary was at last alone.

Alone in the house with Roger Poole!

Her little plans were all made, and she went to work at once to execute them.

It was a dull afternoon, and the old-fashioned drawing-room, with its dying fire, and pale carpet, its worn stuffed furniture and pallid mirrors looked dreary.

Mary had Susan Jenks replenish the fire. Then she drew up to it one of the deep stuffed chairs and a lighter one of mahogany, which matched the low tea-table which was at the left of the fireplace. She set a tapestry screen so that it cut off this corner from the rest of the room and from the door.

Gordon had brought, the night before, a great box of flowers, and there were valley lilies among them. Mary put the lilies on the table in a jar of gray-green pottery. Then she went up-stairs and changed the street costume which she had worn to church for her old green velvet gown. When she came down, the fire was snapping, and the fragrance of the lilies made sweet the screened space—Susan had placed on the little table a red lacquered tray, and an old silver kettle.

Susan had also delivered the note which Mary had given her to the Tower Rooms.

Until Roger came down Mary readjusted and rearranged everything. She felt like a little girl who plays at keeping house. Some new sense seemed waked within her, a sense which made her alive to the coziness and comfort and seclusion of this cut-off corner. She found herself trying to see it all through Roger Poole's eyes.

When he came at last around the corner of the screen, she smiled and gave him her hand.

"This is to be our hour together. I had to plan for it. Did you ever feel that the world was so full of people that there was no corner in which to be—alone?"

As he sat down in the big chair, and the light shone on his face, she saw how tired he looked, as if the days and the nights since she had seen him, had been days and nights of vigil.

She felt a surging sense of sympathy, which set her trembling as she had trembled when she had touched his letter as it had laid on her desk, but when she spoke her voice was steady.

"I am going to make you a cup of tea—then we can talk."

He watched her as she made it, her deft hands unadorned, except by the one quaint ring, the whiteness of her skin set on by her green gown, the whiteness of her soul symbolized by the lilies.

He leaned forward and spoke suddenly. "Mary Ballard," he said, "if I ever reach paradise, I shall pray that it may be like this, with the golden light and the fragrance, and you in the midst of it."

Earnestly over the lilies, she looked at him. "Then you believe in Paradise?"

"I should like to think that in some blessed future state I should come upon you in a garden of lilies."

"Perhaps you will." She was smiling, but her hand shook.

She felt shy, almost tongue-tied. She made him his tea, and gave him a cup; then she spoke of commonplaces, and the little kettle boiled and bubbled and sang as if there were no sorrow or sadness in the whole wide world.

She came at last timidly to the thing she had to say.

"I don't quite know how to begin about your letter. You see when I read it, it wasn't easy for me at first to think straight. I hadn't thought of you as having any such background to your life. Somehow the outlines I had filled in were—different. I am not quite sure what I had thought—only it had been nothing like—this."

"I know. You could not have been expected to imagine such a past."

"Oh, it is not your past which weighs so heavily—on my heart; it is your future."

Her eyes were full of tears. She had not meant to say it just that way. But it had come—her voice breaking on the last words.

He did not speak at once, and then he said: "I have no right to trouble you with my future."

"But I want to be troubled."

"I shall not let you. I shall not ask that of your friendship. Last night when I came back to my rooms I found a rose blooming upon the pages of a book. It seemed to tell me that I had not lost your friendship; and you have given me this hour. This is all I have a right to ask of your generosity."

She moved the jar of lilies aside, so that there might be nothing between them. "If I am your friend, I must help you," she said, "or what would my friendship be worth?"

"There is no help," he said, hurriedly, "not in the sense that I think you mean it. My past has made my future. I cannot throw myself into the fight again. I know that I have been called all sorts of a coward for not facing life. But I could face armies, if it were anything tangible. I could do battle with a sword or a gun or my fists, if there were a visible adversary. But whispers—you can't kill them; and at last they—kill you."

"I don't want you to fight," she said, and now behind the whiteness of her skin there was a radiance. "I don't want you to fight. I want you to deliver your message."

"What message?"

"The message that every man who stands in the pulpit must have for the world, else he has no right to stand there."

"You think then that I had no message?"

"I think," and now her hand went out to him across the table, as if she would soften the words, "I think that if you had felt yourself called to do that one thing, that nothing would have swayed you from it—there are people not in the churches, who never go to church, who want what you have to give—there are the highways and hedges. Oh, surely, not all of the people worth preaching to are the ones in the pews."

She flung the challenge at him directly.

And he flung it back to her, "If I had had such a woman as you in my life——"

"Oh, don't, don't." The radiance died. "What has any woman to do with it? It is you—yourself, who must stand the test."

After the ringing words there was dead silence. Roger sat leaning forward, his eyes not upon her, but upon the fire. In his white face there was no hint of weakness; there was, rather, pride, obstinacy, the ruggedness of inflexible purpose.

"I am afraid," he said at last, "that I have not stood the test."

Her clear eyes met his squarely. "Then meet it now."

For a moment he blazed. "I know now what you think of me, that I am a man who has shirked."

"You know I do not think that."

He surrendered. "I do know it. And I need your help."

Shaken by their emotion, they became conscious that this was indeed their hour. She told him all that she had dreamed he might do. Her color came and went as she drew the picture of his future. Some of the advice she gave was girlish, impracticable, but through it all ran the thread of her faith to him. She felt that she had the solution. That through service he was to find—God.

It was a wonderful hour for Roger Poole. An hour which was to shine like a star in his memory. Mary's mind had a largeness of vision, the ability to rise above the lesser things in order to reach the greater, which seemed super-feminine. It was not until afterward when he reviewed what they had said, that he was conscious that she had placed the emphasis on what he was to do. Not once had she spoken of what had been done—not once had she spoken of his wife.

"You mustn't bury yourself. You must find a way to reach first one group and then another. And after a time you'll begin to feel that you can face the world."

He winced. As she put it into words, he began to see himself as others must have seen him. And the review was not a pleasant one.

In a sense that hour with Mary Ballard in the screened space by the fire was the hour of Roger Poole's spiritual awakening. He realized for the first time that he had missed the meaning of the candles on the altar, the voices in the choir; he had missed the knowledge that one must spend and be spent in the service of humanity.

"I must think it over," he said. "You mustn't expect too much of me all at once."

"I shall expect—everything."

As she spoke and smiled, and it seemed to him that his old garment of fear slipped from him—as if he were clothed in the shining armor of her confidence in him.

They had little time to talk after that, for it was not long before they heard without the bray of a motor horn.

Roger rose at once.

"I must go before they come," he said.

But she laid her hand upon his arm. "No," she said, "you are not to go. You are never going to run away from the world again. Set aside the screen, please—and stay."

Porter, picked up on the way, came in with the others, to behold that glowing corner, and those two together.

With his red crest flaming, he advanced upon them.

"Somebody said 'tea.' May I have some, Mary?"

"When the kettle boils." She had risen, and was holding out her hand to him.

As the two men shook hands, Porter was conscious of some subtle change in Roger. What had come over the man—had he dared to make love to Mary?

And Mary? He looked at her.

She was serenely filling her tea ball. She had lighted the lamp beneath her kettle, and the blue flame seemed to cast her still further back among the shadows of her corner.

Grace Clendenning and Aunt Frances had come back with the rest for tea. Grace's head, with Porter's, gave the high lights of the scene. Barry had nicknamed them the "red-headed woodpeckers," and the name seemed justified.

While Porter devoted himself to Grace, however, he was acutely conscious of every movement of Mary's. Why had she given up her afternoon to Roger Poole? He had asked if he might come, and she had said, "after four," and now it was after four, and the hour which she would not give him had been granted to this lodger in the Tower Rooms.

It has been said before that Porter was not a snob, but to him Mary's attitude of friendliness toward this man, who was not one of them, was a matter of increasing irritation. What was there about this tall thin chap with the tired eyes to attract a woman? Porter was not conceited, but he knew that he possessed a certain value. Of what value in the eyes of the world was Roger Poole—a government clerk, without ambition, handsome in his dark way, but pale and surrounded by an air of gloom?

But to-night it was as if the gloom had lifted. To-night Roger shone as he had shone on the night of the Thanksgiving party—he seemed suddenly young and splendid—the peer of them all.

It came about naturally that, as they drank their tea, some one asked him to recite.

"Please "—it was Mary who begged.

Porter jealously intercepted the look which flashed between them, but could make nothing of it.

"The Whittington one is too long," Roger stated, "and I haven't Pittiwitz for inspiration—but here's another."

Leaning forward with his eyes on the fire, he gave it.

It was a man's poem. It was in the English of the hearty times of Ben Jonson and of Kit Marlowe—and every swinging line rang true.

"What will you say when the world is dying? What when the last wild midnight falls, Dark, too dark for the bat to be flying Round the ruins of old St. Paul's? What will be last of the lights to perish? What but the little red ring we knew, Lighting the hands and the hearts that cherish A fire, a fire, and a friend or two!"

CHORUS: "Up now, answer me, tell me true. What will be last of the stars to perish? —The fire that lighteth a friend or two."

As the last brave verse was ended, Gordon Richardson said, "By Jove, how it comes back to me—you used to recite Poe's 'Bells' at school."

Roger laughed. "Yes. I fancy I made them boom toward the end."

"You used to make me shiver and shake in my shoes."

Aunt Frances' voice broke in crisply, "What do you mean, Gordon; were you at school with Mr. Poole?"

"Yes. St. Martin's, Aunt Frances."

The name had a magic effect upon Mrs. Clendenning; the boys of St. Martin's were of the elect.

"Poole?" she said. "Are you one of the New York Pooles?"

Roger nodded. "Yes. With a Southern grafting—my mother was a Carew."

He was glad now to tell it. Let them follow what clues they would. He was ready for them. Henceforth nothing was to be hidden.

"I am going down next week," he continued, "to stay for a time with a cousin of my mother's—Miss Patty Carew. She lives still in the old manor house which was my grandfather's—she hadn't much but poverty and the old house for an inheritance, but it is still a charming place."

Aunt Frances was intent, however, on the New York branch of his family tree.

"Was your grandfather Angus Poole?"

"Yes."

Grace was wickedly conscious of her mother's state of mind. No one could afford to ignore any descendant of Angus Poole. To be sure, a second generation had squandered the fortune he had left, but his name was still one to conjure with.

"I never dreamed——" said Aunt Frances.

"Naturally," said Roger, and there was a twinkle in his eyes. "I am afraid I'm not a credit to my hard-headed financier of a grandfather."

It seemed to Mary that for the first time she was seeing him as he might have been before his trouble came upon him. And she was swept forward to the thought of what he might yet be. She grew warm and rosy in her delight that he should thus show himself to her people. She looked up to find Porter's accusing eyes fixed on her; and in the grip of a sudden shyness, she gave herself again to her tea-making.

"Surely some of you will have another cup?"

It developed that Aunt Frances would, and that the water was cold, and that the little lamp was empty of alcohol.

Mary filled it, and, her hand shaking from her inward excitement, let the alcohol overflow on the tray and on the kettle frame. She asked for a match and Gordon gave her one.

Then, nobody knew how it happened! The flames seemed to sweep up in a blue sheet toward the lace frills in the front of Mary's gown. It leaped toward her face. Constance screamed. Then Roger reached her, and she was in his arms, her face crushed against the thickness of his coat, his hands snatching at her frills.

It was over in a moment. The flames were out. Very gently, he loosed his arms. She lay against his shoulder white and still. Her face was untouched, but across her throat, which the low collar had left exposed, was a hot red mark. And a little lock of hair was singed at one side, her frills were in ruins.

He put her into a chair, and they gathered around her—a solicitous group. Porter knelt beside her. "Mary, Mary," he kept saying, and she smiled weakly, as his voice broke on "Contrary Mary."

Gordon had saved the table from destruction. But the flame had caught the lilies, crisping them, and leaving them black. Constance was shaken by the shock, and Aunt Frances kept asking wildly, "How did it happen?"

"I spilled the alcohol when I filled it," Mary said. "It was a silly thing to do—if I had had on one of my thinner gowns——" She shuddered and stopped.

"I shall send you an electric outfit to-morrow," Porter announced. "Don't fool with that thing again, Mary."

Roger stood behind her chair, with his arms folded on the top and said nothing. There was really nothing for him to say, but there were many things to think. He had saved that dear face from flame or flaw, the dear eyes had been hidden against his shoulder—his fingers smarted where he had clutched at her burning frills.

Porter Bigelow might take possession of her now, he might give her electric outfits, he might call her by her first name, but it had not been Porter who had saved her from the flames; it had not been Porter who had held her in his arms.



CHAPTER XIII

In Which the Whole World is at Sixes and Sevens, and in Which Life is Looked Upon as a Great Adventure.

It had been decided that, for a time at least, Gordon and Constance should stay with Mary. In the spring they would again go back to London. Grace Clendenning and Aunt Frances were already installed for the winter at their hotel.

The young couple would occupy the Sanctum and the adjoining room, and Mary was to take on an extra maid to help Susan Jenks.

In all her planning, Mary had a sense of the pervasiveness of Gordon Richardson. With masculine confidence in his ability, he took upon himself not only his wife's problems, but Mary's. Mary was forced to admit, even while she rebelled, that his judgments were usually wise. Yet, she asked herself, what right had an outsider to dictate in matters which pertained to herself and Barry? And what right had he to offer her board for Constance? Constance, who was her very own?

But when she had indignantly voiced her objection to Gordon, he had laughed. "You are like all women, Mary," he had said, "and of course I appreciate your point of view and your hospitality. But if you think that I am going to let my wife stay here and add to your troubles and expense without giving adequate compensation, you are vastly mistaken. If you won't let us pay, we won't stay, and that's all there is to it."

Here was masculine firmness against which Mary might rage impotently. After all, Constance was Gordon's wife, and he could carry her off.

"Of course," she said, yielding stiffly, "you must do as you think best."

"I shall," he said, easily, "and I will write you a check now, and you can have it to settle any immediate demands upon your exchequer. I shall be away a good deal, and I want Constance to be with you and Aunt Isabelle. It is a favor to me, Mary, to have her here. You mustn't add to my obligations by making me feel too heavily in your debt."

He smiled as he said it, and Gordon had a nice smile. And presently Mary found herself smiling back.

"Gordon," she said, in a half apology, "Porter calls me Contrary Mary. Maybe I am—but you see, Constance was my sister before she was your wife."

He leaned back in his chair and looked at her. "And you've had twenty years more of her than I—but please God, Mary, I am going to have twenty beautiful years ahead of me to share with her—I hope it may be three times twenty."

His voice shook, and in that moment Mary felt nearer to him than ever before.

"Oh, Gordon," she said, "I'm a horrid little thing. I've been jealous because you took Constance away from me. But now I'm glad you—took her, and I hope I'll live to dance at your—golden wedding." And then, most unexpectedly, she found herself sobbing, and Gordon was patting her on the back in a big-brotherly way, and saying that he didn't blame her a bit, and that if anybody wanted to take Constance away from him, they'd have to do it over his dead body.

Then he wrote the check, and Mary took it, and in the knowledge of his munificence, felt the relief from certain financial burdens.

Before he left her, Gordon, hesitating, referred gravely to another subject.

"And it will be better for you to have Constance here if Barry goes away."

"Barry?" breathlessly.

"Yes. Don't you think he ought to go, Mary?"

"No," she said, stubbornly; "where could he go?"

"Anywhere away from Leila. He mustn't marry that child. Not yet—not until he has proved himself a man."

The blow hit her heavily. Yet her sense of justice told her that he was right.

"I can't talk about it," she said, unsteadily; "Barry is all I have left."

He rose. "Poor little girl. We must see how we can work it out. But we've got to work it out. It mustn't drift."

Left alone, Mary sat down at her desk and faced the future. With Roger gone, and Barry going——

And the Tower Rooms empty!

She shivered. Before her stretched the darkness and storms of a long winter. Even Constance's coming would not make up for it. And yet a year ago Constance had seemed everything.

She crossed the hall to the dining-room and looked out of the window. The garden was dead. The fountain had ceased to play. But the little bronze boy still flung his gay defiance to wind and weather.

Pittiwitz, following her, murmured a mewing complaint. Mary picked her up; since Roger's going the gray cat had kept away from the emptiness of the upper rooms.

With the little purring creature hugged close, Mary reviewed her worries—the world was at sixes and sevens. Even Porter was proving difficult. Since the Sunday when Roger had saved her from the fire, Porter had adopted an air of possession. He claimed her at all times and seasons; she had a sense of being caught in a web woven of kindness and thoughtfulness and tender care, but none the less a web which held her fast and against her will.

Whimsically it came to her that the four men in her life were opposed in groups of two: Gordon and Porter stood arrayed on the side of logical preferences; Barry and Roger on the side of illogical sympathies.

Gordon had conveyed to her, in rather subtle fashion, his disapproval of Roger. It was only in an occasional phrase, such as "Poor Poole," or "if all of his story were known." But Mary had grasped that, from the standpoint of her brother-in-law, a man who had failed to fulfil the promise of his youth might be dismissed as a social derelict.

As for Barry—the situation with regard to him had become acute. His first disappearance after the coming of Constance had resulted in Gordon's assuming the responsibility of the search for him. He had found Barry in a little town on the upper Potomac, ostensibly on a fishing trip, and again there was a need for fighting dragons.

But Gordon did not fight with the same weapons as Roger Poole. His arguments had been shrewd, keen, but unsympathetic. And the result had been a strained relation between him and Barry. The boy had felt himself misunderstood. Gordon had sat in judgment. Constance had tearfully agreed with Gordon, and Mary, torn between her sense of Gordon's rightness, and her own championship of Barry, had been strung to the point of breaking.

She turned from the window, and went up-stairs slowly. In the Sanctum, Constance and Aunt Isabelle were sewing. At last Aunt Isabelle had come into her own. She spent her days in putting fine stitches into infinitesimal garments. There was about her constantly the perfume of the sachet powder with which she was scenting the fine lawn and lace which glorified certain baskets and bassinets. When she was not sewing she was knitting—little silken socks for a Cupid's foot, little warm caps, doll's size; puffy wool blankets on big wooden needles.

The Sanctum had taken on the aspect of a bower. Here Constance sat enthroned—and in her gentleness reminded Mary more and more of her mother. Here was always the sweetness of the flowers with which Gordon kept his wife supplied; here, too, was an atmosphere of serene waiting for a supreme event.

Mary, entering with Pittiwitz in her arms, tried to cast away her worries on the threshold. She must not be out of tune with this symphony. She smiled and sat down beside Constance. "Such lovely little things," she said; "what can I do?"

It seemed that there was a debate on, relative to the suitability of embroidery as against fine tucks.

Mary settled it. "Let me have it," she said; "I'll put in a few tucks and a little embroidery—I shall be glad to have my fingers busy."

"You're always so occupied with other things," Constance complained, gently. "I don't see half enough of you."

"You have Gordon," Mary remarked.

"You say that as if it really made a difference."

"It does," Mary murmured. Then, lest she trouble Constance's gentle soul, she added bravely, "But Gordon's a dear. And you're a lucky girl."

"I know I am." Constance was complacent. "And I knew you'd recognize it, when you'd seen more of Gordon."

Mary felt a rising sense of rebellion. She was not in a mood to hear a catalogue of Gordon's virtues. But she smiled, bravely. "I'll admit that he is perfect," she said; "we won't quarrel over it, Con, dear."

But to herself she was saying, "Oh, I should hate to marry a perfect man."

All the morning she sat there, her needle busy, and gradually she was soothed by the peace of the pleasant room. The world seemed brighter, her problems receded.

Just before luncheon was announced came Aunt Frances and Grace.

They brought gifts, wonderful little things, made by the nuns of France—sheer, exquisite, tied with pale ribbons.

"We are going from here to Leila's," Aunt Frances informed them; "we ordered some lovely trousseau clothes and they came with these."

Trousseau clothes? Leila's? Mary's needle pricked the air for a moment.

"They haven't set the day, you know, Aunt Frances; it will be a long engagement."

"I don't believe in long engagements," Aunt Frances' tone was final; "they are not wise. Barry ought to settle down."

Nobody answered. There was nothing to say, but Mary was oppressed by the grim humor of it all. Here was Aunt Frances bearing garments for the bride, while Gordon was planning to steal the bridegroom.

She stood up. "You better stay to lunch," she said; "it is Susan Jenks' hot roll day, and you know her rolls."

Aunt Frances peeled off her long gloves. "I hoped you'd ask us, we are so tired of hotel fare."

Grace laughed. "Mother is of old New York," she said, "and better for her are hot rolls and chops from her own kitchen range, than caviar and truffles from the hands of a hotel chef—in spite of all of our globe trotting, she hasn't caught the habit of meals with the mob."

Grace went down with Mary, and the two girls found Susan Jenks with the rolls all puffy and perfect in their pans.

"There's plenty of them," she said to Mary, "an' if the croquettes give out, you can fill up on rolls."

"Susan," Grace said, "when Mary gets married will you come and keep house for me?"

Susan smiled. "Miss Mary ain't goin' to git married."

"Why not?"

"She ain't that kind. She's the kind that looks at a man and studies about him, and then she waves him away and holds up her head, and says, 'I'm sorry, but you won't do.'"

The two girls laughed. "How did you get that idea of me, Susan?" Mary asked.

"By studyin' you," said Susan. "I ain't known you all your life for nothin'.

"Now Miss Constance," she went on, as she opened the oven and peeped in, "Miss Constance is just the other way. 'Most any nice man was bound to git her. An' it was lucky that Mr. Gordon was the first."

"And what about me?" was Grace's demand.

"Go 'way," said Susan, "you knows yo'se'f, Miss Grace. You bats your eyes at everybody, and gives your heart to nobody."

"And so Mary and I are to be old maids—oh, Susan."

"They don't call them old maids any more," Susan said, "and they ain't old maids, not in the way they once was. An old maid is a woman who ain't got any intrus' in life but the man she can't have, and you all is the kin' that ain't got no intrus' in the men that want you."

They left her, laughing, and when they reached the dining-room they sat down on the window-seat; where Mary had gazed out upon the dead garden and the bronze boy.

"And now," said Grace, "tell me about Roger Poole."

"There isn't much to tell. He's given up his position in the Treasury, and he's gone down to his cousin's home for a while. He's going to try to write for the magazines; he thinks that stories of that section will take."

"He's in love with you, Mary. But you're not in love with him—and you mustn't be."

"Of course not. I'm not going to marry, Grace."

Grace gave her a little squeeze. "You don't know what you are going to do, darling; no woman does. But I don't want you to fall in love with anybody yet. Flit through life with me for a time. I'll take you to Paris next summer, and show you my world."

"I couldn't, unless I could pay my own way."

"Oh, Mary, what makes you fight against anybody doing anything for you?"

"Porter says it is my contrariness—-but I just can't hold out my hands and let things drop into them."

"I know—and that's why you won't marry Porter Bigelow."

Mary flashed at her a surprised and grateful glance. "Grace," she said, solemnly, "you're the first person who has seemed to understand."

"And I understand," said Grace, "because to me life is a Great Adventure. Everything that happens is a hazard on the highway—as yet I haven't found a man who will travel the road with me; they all want to open a gate and shut me in and say, 'Stay here.'"

Mary's eyes were shining. "I feel that, too."

Grace kissed her. "You'd laugh, Mary, if I told the dream which is at the end of my journey."

"I sha'n't laugh—tell me."

There was a rich color in Grace's cheeks. In her modish frock of the black which she affected, and which was this morning of fine serge set on by a line of fur at hem and wrist, and topped by a little hat of black velvet which framed the vividness of her glorious hair, she looked the woman of the world, so that her words gained strength by force of contrast.

"Nobody would believe it," she prefaced, "but, Mary Ballard, some day when I'm tired of dancing through life, when I am weary of the adventures on the road, I'm going to build a home for little children, and spend my days with them."

So the two girls dreamed dreams and saw visions of the future. They sang and soared, they kissed and confided.

"Whatever comes, life shall never be commonplace," Mary declared, and as the bell rang and she went to the table, she felt that now nothing could daunt her—the hard things would be merely a part of a glorious pilgrimage.

Susan's hot rolls were pronounced perfect, and Susan, serenely conscious of it, banished the second maid to the kitchen and waited on the table herself.

Here were five women of one clan. She understood them all, she loved them all. She gave even to Aunt Frances her due. "They all holds their heads high," she had confided on one occasion to Roger Poole, "and Miss Frances holds hers so high that she almost bends back, but she knows how to treat the people who work for her, and she's always been mighty good to me."

Mary's mood of exaltation lasted long after her guests had departed. She found herself singing as she climbed the stairs that night to her room. And it was with this mood still upon her that she wrote to Roger Poole.

Her letter, penned on the full tide of her new emotion, was like wine to his thirsty soul. It began and ended formally, but every line throbbed with hope and courage, and responding to the note which she had struck, he wrote back to her.



CHAPTER XIV

In Which Mary Writes From the Tower Rooms; and in Which Roger Answers From Among the Pines.

The Tower Rooms.

Dear Mr. Poole:

I have taken your rooms for mine, and this is my first evening in them. Pittiwitz is curled up under the lamp. She misses you and so do I. Even now, it seems as if your books ought to be on the table; and that I ought to be talking to you instead of writing.

I liked your letter. It seemed to tell me that you were hopeful and at home. You must tell me about the house and your Cousin Patty—about everything in your life—and you must send me your first story.

Here everything is the same. Constance will be with me until spring, and we are to have a quiet Thanksgiving and a quiet Christmas with just the family, and Leila and the General. Porter Bigelow goes to Palm Beach to be with his mother. I don't know why we always count him in as one of the family except that he never waits for an invitation, and of course we're glad to have him. Mother and father used to feel sorry for him; he was always a sort of "Poor-little-rich-boy" whose money cut him out from lots of good times that families have who don't live in such formal fashion as Mr. and Mrs. Bigelow seem to enjoy.

As soon as Constance leaves, I am going to work. I haven't told any one, for when I hinted at it, Constance was terribly upset, and asked me to live with her and Gordon. Grace wants me to go to Paris with her; Barry and Leila have stated that I can have a home with them.

But I don't want a home with anybody. I want to live my own life, as I have told you. I want to try my wings. I don't believe you quite like the idea of my working. Nobody does, not even Grace Clendenning, although Grace seems to understand me better than any one else.

Grace and I have been talking to-day about life as a great adventure. And it seems to me that we have the right idea. So many people go through life as just something to be endured, but I want to make things happen, or rather, if big things don't happen, I want to see in the little things something that is interesting. I don't believe that any life need be common-place. It is just the way we look at it. I'm copying these words which I read in one of your books; perhaps you've seen them, but anyhow it will tell you better than I what I mean.

"But life is a great adventure, and the worst of all fears is the fear of living. There are many forms of success, many forms of triumph. But there is no other success that in any way approaches that which is open to most of the many men and women who have the right idea. These are the men and the women who see that it is the intimate and homely things that count most. They are the men and women who have the courage to strive for the happiness which comes only with labor and effort and self-sacrifice, and only to those whose joy in life springs in part from power of work and sense of duty."

Aren't those words like a strong wind blowing from the sea? I just love them. And I know you will. I am so glad that I can talk to you of such things. Everybody has to have a friend who can understand—and that's the fine thing about our friendship—that we both have things to overcome, and that our letters can be reports of progress.

Of course the things which I have to overcome are just little fussy woman things—but they are big to me because I am breaking away from family traditions. All the women our household have followed the straight and narrow path of conventional living. Even Grace does it, although she rebels inwardly—but Aunt Frances keeps her to it. Once Grace tried to be an artist, and she worked hard in Paris, until Aunt Frances swooped down and carried her off—Grace still speaks of that time in Paris as her year out of prison. You see she worked hard and met people who worked, too, and it interested her. She had a studio apartment, and was properly chaperoned by a little widow who went with her and shared her rooms.

But Aunt Frances popped in on them suddenly one day and found a Bohemian party. There wasn't anything wrong about it, Grace says, but you know Aunt Frances! She has never ceased to talk about the frumpy crowd she met there. She hated the students in their velvet coats and the women with their poor queer clothes. And Grace loved them. But she's given up the idea of ever living there again. She says you can't do a thing twice and have it the same. I don't know. I only know that Grace may seem frivolous on the outside, but that underneath she is different. She has taken up advanced ideas about women, and she says that I have them naturally, and that she didn't expect such a thing in Washington where everybody stops to think what somebody else is going to say. But I haven't arrived at the point where I am really interested in Suffrage and things like that. Grace says that I must begin to look beyond my own life, and perhaps when I get some of my own problems settled, I will. And then I shall be taking up the problems of the girls in factories and the girls in laundries and the girls in the big shops, as Grace is. She says that she may live like a bond-slave herself, but she'd like to help other women to be free.

And now I must tell you about Delilah Jeliffe. She had a house-warming last week. The old house in Georgetown is a dream. Delilah hasn't a superfluous or gorgeous thing in it. Everything is keyed to the old-family note. Some of the things are even shabby. She has done away with flamingo colors, and her monkeys with the crystal ball and the peacock screen. She has little stools in her drawing-room with faded covers of canvas work, and she has samplers and cracked portraits, and the china doesn't all match. There isn't a sign of "new richness" in the place. She keeps colored servants, and doesn't wear rings, and her gowns are frilly flowing white things which make her look like one of those demure grandmotherly young persons of the early sixties.

Her little artist is a charming blond who doesn't come up to her shoulders, and Delilah hangs on every word he says. For the moment he obscures all the other men on her horizon. He made sketches of the way every room in her house ought to look. And what seems to be the result of years of formal pleasant living really is the result of the months of hunting and hard work which he and Delilah have put in. He even indicates the flowers she shall wear, and those which are to bloom next summer in her garden. She affects heliotrope, and on the night of her house-warming she carried a tight bunch of it with a few pink rosebuds.

Really, in her new role Delilah is superb. And, people are beginning to notice her and to call on her. Even in this short time she has been invited to some very good houses. She has a new way with her eyes, and drops her lashes over them, and is very still and lovely.

Do you remember her leopard skins of last year? Well, now she wears moleskins—a queer dolman-shaped wrap of them, and a little hat with a dull blue feather, and she drapes a black lace veil over the hat and looks like a duchess.

Grace Clendenning says that Delilah and her artist will achieve a triumph if they keep on. They aren't trying to storm society, they are trying to woo it, and out of it the artist gets the patronage of the people whom he meets through Delilah. Perhaps it will end by Delilah's marrying him. But Grace says not. She says that Delilah simply squeezes people dry, like so many oranges, and when she has what she wants, she throws them aside.

Yet Grace and Delilah get along very well together. Grace has always made a study of clothes, because it is the only way in which she can find an outlet for her artistic tastes. And she is interested in Delilah's methods. She says that they are masterly.

But I am forgetting to tell you what Delilah said of you. It was on the night of her house-warming. She asked about you, and when I said that you had gone south to get atmosphere for some stories you were writing, she said:

"Do you know it came to me yesterday, while I was in church, where I had seen him. It was the same text, and that was what brought it back. He was preaching, my dear. I remember that I sat in the front pew and looked up at him, and thought that I had never heard such a voice; and now, tell me why he has given it up, and why he is burying himself in the South?"

At first I didn't know just what to say, and then I thought it best to tell the truth. So I looked straight at her, and said: "He made a most unhappy marriage, and gave up his life-work. But now his wife is dead, and some day he may preach again." Was it wrong for me to say that? I do hope you are going to preach; somehow I feel that you will. And anyhow while people need never know the details of your story, they will have to know the outlines. It seemed to me that the easiest way was to tell it and have it over.

Of course Gordon has asked some questions, and I have told what I thought should be told. I hope that you won't feel that I have been unwise. I thought it best to start straight, and then there would be nothing to hide.

And now may I tell you a little bit about Barry? They want him to go away—back to England with Gordon and Constance. You see Gordon looks at it without sentiment. Gordon's sentiment stops at Constance. He thinks that Barry should simply give Leila up, go away, and not come back until he can show a clear record.

Of course I know that Gordon is right. But I can't bear it—that's why I haven't been able to face things with quite the courage that I thought I could. But since my talk with Grace, I am going to look at it differently. I shall try to feel that Barry's going is best, and that he must ride away gallantly, and come back with trumpets blowing and flags flying.

And that's the way you must some day come into your own.—I like to think about it. I like to think about victory and conquest, instead of defeat and failure. Somehow thinking about a thing seems to bring it, don't you think?

Oh, but this is such a long letter, and it is gossipy, and scrappy. But that's the way we used to talk, and you seemed to like it.

And now I'll say "Good-night." Pittiwitz waked up a moment ago, and walked across this sheet, and the blot is where she stepped on a word. So that's her message. But my message is Psalms 27:14. You can look it up in father's Bible—I am so glad you took it with you. But perhaps you don't have to look up verses; you probably know everything by heart. Do you?

Sincerely ever,

MARY BALLARD.

Among the Pines.

My good little friend:

I am not going to try to tell you what your letter meant to me. It was the bluebird's song in the spring, the cool breeze in the desert, sunlight after storm—it was everything that stands for satisfaction after a season of discomfort or of discontent.

Yet, except that I miss the Tower Rooms, and miss, too, the great happiness I found in pursuing our friendship at close range, I should have no reason here either for discomfort or lack of content—if I feel the world somewhat barren, it is not because of what I have found, but because of what I have brought with me.

I like to think of you in the Tower Rooms. You always belonged there, and I felt like a usurper when I came and discovered that all of your rosy belongings had been moved down-stairs and my staid and stiff things were in their place. It is queer, isn't it, the difference in the atmosphere made by a man and by a woman. A man dares not surround himself with pale and pretty colors and delicate and dainty things, lest he be called effeminate—perhaps that's why men take women into their lives, so that they may have the things which they crave without having their masculinity questioned.

Yet the atmosphere which seems to fit you best is not merely one of rosiness and prettiness; it is rather that of sunshine and out-of-doors. When you talk or write to me I have the sensation of being swept on and on by your enthusiasms—I seem to fly on strong wings—the quotation which you gave is the utterance of some one else, but you unerringly selected, and passed it on to me, and so in a sense made it your own. I am going to copy it and illumine it, and keep it where I can see it at all times.

I find that I do not travel as fast as you toward my future. I have shut myself up for many years. I have been so sure that all the wine of life was spilled, that the path ahead of me was dreary, that I cannot see myself at all with trumpets blowing, with flags flying and the rest of it. Perhaps I shall some day—and at least I shall try, and in the trying there will be something gained. Some day, perhaps, I shall reach the upper air where you soar—perhaps I shall "mount as an eagle."

Your message——! Dear child—do you know how sweet you are? I don't know all the verses—but that one I do know. Yet I had let myself forget, and you brought it back to me with all its strong assurance.

Your decision that it was best to tell what there is to tell, to let nothing be hidden, is one which I should have made long ago. Only of late have I realized that concealment brings in its train a thousand horrors. One lives in fear, dreading that which must inevitably come. Yet I do not think I must be blamed too much. I was beaten and bruised by the knowledge of my overthrow. I only wanted to crawl into a hole and be forgotten.

Even now, I find myself unfolding slowly. I have lived so long in the dark, and the light seems to blind my eyes!

It is strange that I should have remembered Delilah Jeliffe, but not strange that she should have remembered me; for I stood alone in the pulpit, but she was one of a crowd. Since your letter, I have been thinking back, and I can see her as she sat reading in the front pew, big and rather fine with her black hair and her bold eyes. I think that perhaps the thing which made me remember her was the fleeting thought that her type stood usually for the material in woman, and I wondered if in her case outward appearances were as deceptive as they were in my wife—with her saint's eyes, and her distorted moral vision. Perhaps I was intuitively right, and that beneath Delilah Jeliffe's exterior there is a certain fineness, and that these funny fads of dress and decorations are merely in some way her striving toward the expression of her real self.

What you tell me of your talk with your cousin Grace interests me very much. I fancy she is more womanly than she is willing to admit. Yet she should marry. Every woman should marry, except you—who are going to be my friend! There peeps out my selfishness—but I shall let it stand.

No, I don't like the idea that you must work. I don't want you to try your wings. I want you to sit safe in your nest in the top of the Tower, and write letters to me!

Labor, office drudgery, are things which sap the color from a woman's cheeks, and strength from her body. She grows into a machine, and you are a bird, to fly and light on the nearest branch and sing!

But now you will want to know something of my life, and of the house and of Cousin Patty.

The house has suffered from the years of poverty since the War. Yet it has still about it something of the dignity of an ancient ruin. It is a big frame structure with the Colonial pillars which belong to the period of its building. Many of the rooms are closed. My own suite is on the second floor—Cousin Patty's opposite, and adjoining her rooms those of an old aunt who is a pensioner.

There is little of the old mahogany which once made the rooms stately, and little of the old silver to grace the table. Cousin Patty's poverty is combined, happily, with common sense. She has known the full value of her antiques, and has preferred good food to family traditions. Yet there are the old portraits and in her living-room a few choice pieces. Here we have an open fire, and here we sit o' nights.

Cousin Patty is small, rather white and thin, and she is fifty-five. I tell you her age, because in a way it explains many things which would otherwise puzzle you. She was born just before the war. She knew nothing of the luxury of the days of slavery. She has twisted and turned and economized all of her life. She has struggled with all the problems which beset the South in Reconstruction times, and she has come out if it all, sweet and shrewd, and with a point of view about women which astonishes me, and which gives us a chance for many sprightly arguments. Her black hair is untouched with gray, she wears it parted and in a thick knot high on her head. Her gowns are invariably of black silk, well cut and well made. She makes them herself, and gets her patterns from New York! Can you see her now?

Our arguments are usually about women, and their position in the world to-day. You know I am conservative, clinging much to old ideals, old fashions, to the beliefs of gentler times—but Cousin Patty in this backwater of civilization has gone far ahead of me. She believes that the hope of the South is in its women. "They read more than the men," she says, "and they have responded more quickly to the new social ideals."

But of our arguments more in another letter—this will serve, however, to introduce you to some of the astonishing mental processes of this little marooned cousin of mine.

For in a sense she is marooned. Once upon a time when Cotton was king, and slave labor made all things possible, there was prosperity here, but now the land is impoverished. So Cousin Patty does not depend upon the land. She read in some of her magazines of a woman who had made a fortune in wedding cake. She resolved that what one woman could do could be done by another. Hence she makes and sells wedding cake, and while she has not made a fortune she has made a living. She began by asking friends for orders; she now gets orders from near and far.

So all day there is the good smell of baking in the house, and the sound of the whisking of eggs. And every day little boxes have to be filled. Will you smile when I tell you that I like the filling of the little boxes? And that while we talk o' nights, I busy myself with this task, while Cousin Patty does things with narrow white ribbon and bits of artificial orange blossoms, so that the packages which go out may be as beautiful and bride-y as possible.

It is strange, when one thinks of it, that I came to your house on a wedding night, and here I live in a perpetual atmosphere of wedding blisses.

In the morning I write. In the afternoon I do other things. The weather is not cold—it is dry and sunshiny—windless. I take long walks over the hills and far away. Some of it is desolate country where the boxed pines have fallen, or where an area has been burned but one comes now and then upon groves of shimmering and shining young trees,—is there any tree as beautiful as a young pine with the sunshine on it?

It is rare to find a grove of old pines, yet there are one or two estates where for years no trees have been cut or burned, and beneath these tall old singing monarchs I sit on the brown needles, and write and write—to what end I know not.

I have not one finished story to show you, though the beginnings of many. The pen is not my medium. My thoughts seem to dry up when I try to put them on paper. It is when I talk that I grow most eloquent. Oh, little friend, shall I ever make the world listen again?

I am going to tell you presently of those who have listened, down here—such an audience—and in such an amphitheater!

My walks take me far afield. The roads are sandy, and I do not always follow them, preferring, rather, the dunes which remind me so much of those by the sea. Once upon a time this ground was the ocean's bed—I have the feeling always that just beyond the low hills I shall glimpse the blue.

Now and then I meet some darkey of the old school with his cheery greeting; now and then on the highroad a schooner wagon sails by. These wagons give one the queer feeling of being set back to pioneer days,—do you remember the Pike's Peak picture at the Capitol with all the eager faces turned toward the setting sun?

Now and then I run across a hunting party from one of the big hotels which are getting to be plentiful in this healthy region, but these people with their sporting clothes and their sophistication always seem out of place among the pines.

And now, since you have written to me of life as a journey on the highroad, I will tell you of my first adventure.

There's a schooner-man who comes from the sandhills on his way to the nearest resort with his chickens and eggs. It is a three days' journey, and he camps out at night, sleeping in his wagon, building his fire in the open.

One day he passed me as I sat tired by the wayside, and offered to give me a lift toward home. I accepted, and rode beside him. And thus began an acquaintance which interests me, and evidently pleases him.

He is tall and loosely put together, this knight of the Sandy Road, but with the ease of manner which seems to belong to his kind. There's good blood in these sand-hill people, and it shows in a lack of self-consciousness which makes one feel that they would meet a prince or an emperor without embarrassment. Yet there's nothing of forwardness, nothing of impertinence. It is a drawing-room manner, preserved in spite of generations of illiteracy and degeneration.

He is not an unpicturesque object. Given a plumed hat, a doublet and hose, and he would look the part, and his manner would fit in with it. Given good English, his voice would never betray him for what he is. For another thing that these people have preserved is a softness of voice and an inflection which is Elizabethan rather than twentieth century American.

Having grown to know him fairly well, I fished for an invitation to visit his home. I wanted to see where this gentlemanly backwoodsman spent the days which were not lived on the road.

I carried a rug with me, and slept for the first night under the open sky. Have you ever seen a southern sky when it was studded with stars? If not, there's something yet before you. There's no whiteness or coldness about these stars, they are pure gold, and warm with light.

My schooner-man slept in his wagon, covered with an old quilt. His mules were picketed close by, the dog curled himself beside his master, each getting warmth from the other.

We cooked supper and breakfast over the coals—chickens broiled for our evening meal, ham and eggs for the morning. We gave the dog the bones and the crusts. I took bread with me, for Cousin Patty warned me that I must not depend upon my squire for food. Cooking among these people is a lost art. Cousin Patty believes that the regeneration of the poor whites of the South will be accomplished through the women. "When they learn to cook," she says, "the men won't need whiskey. When the whiskey goes, they'll respect the law."

A mile before we reached the end of our journey, we were met by the children of my schooner-squire. Five of them—two boys, two girls, and a baby in the arms of the oldest girl. They all had the gentle quiet and ease of the father—but they were unkempt little creatures, uncombed, unwashed, in sad-colored clothes. That's the difference between the negro and the white man of this region. The negro is cheerful, debonair, he sings, he dances, and he wears all the colors of the rainbow. An old black woman who carries home my wash wore the other day a purple petticoat with a scarlet skirt looped above it, an old green sweater, and, tied over her head, a pink wool shawl. Against the neutral background of sandy hill she was a delight to the eye. The whites on the other hand seem like little animals, who have taken on the color of the landscape that they may be hidden.

But to go back to my sad children. It seemed to me that in them I was seeing the South with new eyes, perhaps because I have been away just long enough to get the proper perspective. And my life has been, you see, lived in the Southern cities, where one touches rarely the primitive.

The older boys are, perhaps, ten and twelve, blue-eyed and tow-headed. I saw few signs of affection or intelligence. They did not kiss their father when he came, except the small girl, who ran to him and was hugged; the others seemed to practice a sort of incipient stoicism, as if they were too old, too settled, for demonstration.

The mother, as we entered, was like her children. None of them has the initiative or the energy of the man. They are subdued by the changeless conditions of their environment; his one adventure of the week keeps him alert and alive.

It is a desolate country, charred pines sticking up straight from white sand. It might be made beautiful if for every tree that they tapped for turpentine they would plant a new one.

But they don't know enough to make things beautiful. The Moses of this community will be some man who shall find new methods of farming, new crops for this soil, who will show the people how to live.

And now I come to a strange fairy-tale sort of experience—an experience with the children who have lived always among these charred pines.

All that evening as I talked, their eyes were upon me, like the eyes of little wild creatures of the wood—a blank gaze which seemed to question. The next day when I walked, they went with me, and for some distance I carried the baby, to rest the arms of the big girl, who is always burdened.

It was in the afternoon that we drifted to a little grove of young pines, the one bit of pure green against the white and gray and black of that landscape. The sky was of sapphire, with a buzzard or two blotted against the blue.

Here with a circle of the trees surrounding us, the children sat down with me. They were not a talkative group, and I was overcome by a sense of the impossibility of meeting them on any common ground of conversation. But they seemed to expect something—they were like a flock of little hungry birds waiting to be fed—and what do you think I gave them? Guess. But I know you have it wrong.

I recited "Flos Mercatorum," my Whittington poem!

It was done on an impulse, to find if there was anything in them which would respond to such rhyme and rapture of words.

I gave it in my best manner, standing in the center of the circle. I did not expect applause. But I got more than applause. I am not going to try to describe the look that came into the eyes of the oldest boy—the nearest that I can come to it is to say that it was the look of a child waked from a deep sleep, and gazing wide-eyed upon a new world.

He came straight toward me. "Where—did you—git—them words?" he asked in a breathless sort of way.

"A man wrote them—a man named Noyes."

"Are they true?"

"Yes."

"Say them again."

It was not a request. It was a command. And I did say them, and saw a soul's awakening.

Oh, there are people who won't believe that it can be done like that—in a moment. But that boy was ready. He had dreamed and until now no one had ever put the dreams into words for him. He cannot read, has probably never heard a fairy tale—the lore of this region is gruesome and ghostly, rather than lovely and poetic.

Perhaps, 'way back, five, six generations, some ancestor of this lad may have drifted into London town, perhaps the bells sang to him, and subconsciously this sand-hill child was illumined by that inherited memory. Somewhere in the back of his mind bells have been chiming, and he has not known enough to call them bells. However that may be, my verses revealed to him a new heaven and a new earth.

Without knowing anything, he is ready for everything. Perhaps there are others like him. Cousin Patty says there are girls. She insists that the girls need cook-books, not poetry, but I am not sure.

I shall go again to the pines, and teach that boy first by telling him things, then I shall take books. I haven't been as interested in anything for years as I am in that boy.

So, will you think of me as seeing, faintly, the Vision? Your eyes are clearer than mine. You can see farther; and what you see, will you tell me?

And now about Barry. I know how hard it is to have him leave you, and that under all your talk of trumpets blowing and flags flying, there's the ache and the heart-break. I cannot see why such things should come to you. The rest of us probably deserve what we get. But you—I should like to think of you always as in a garden—you have the power to make things bloom. You have even quickened the dry dust of my own dead life, so that now in it there's a little plot of the pansies of my thoughts of you, and there's rosemary, for remembrance, and there's the little bed of my interest in that boy—what seeds did you plant for it?

It is raining here to-night. I wonder it the rain is beating on the windows of the Tower Rooms, and if you are snug within, with Pittiwitz purring and the fire snapping, and I wonder if throughout all that rain you are sending any thought to me.

Perhaps I shouldn't ask it. But I do ask for another letter. What the last was to me I have told you. I shall live on the hope of the next.

Faithfully and gratefully always,

ROGER POOLE.



CHAPTER XV

In Which Barry and Leila Go Over the Hills and Far Away; and in Which a March Moon Becomes a Honeymoon.

The news that Barry must go away had been a blow to Leila's childish dreams of immediate happiness. She knew that Barry was bitter, that he rebelled against the plans which were being made for him, but she did not know that Gordon had told the General frankly and flatly the reason for this delay in the matrimonial arrangements.

The General, true to his ancient code, had protested that "a man could drink like a gentleman," that Barry's good blood would tell. "His wild oats aren't very wild—and every boy must have his fling."

Gordon had listened impatiently, as to an ancient and outworn philosophy. "The business world doesn't take into account the wild oats of a man, General," he had said. "The new game isn't like the old one,—the convivial spirit is not the popular one among men of affairs. And that isn't the worst of it, with Barry's temperament there's danger of a breakdown, moral and physical. If it were not for that, he could come into your office and practice law, as you suggest. But he's got to get away from Washington. He's got to get away from old associations, and you'll pardon me for saying it, he's got to get away from Leila. She loves him, and is sorry for him, even though we've kept from her the knowledge of his fault. She thinks we are all against him and her sympathy weakens him. It was the same with her mother, Constance tells me. She wouldn't believe that her boy could be anything but perfect, and John Ballard wasn't strong enough to counteract her influence. Mary was the only one, and now that it has come to an actual crisis, even Mary blames me for trying to do what I know is best for Barry. I want to take him over to the other side, cut him away from all that hampers him here, and bring him back to you stronger in fiber and more of a man."

The General shook his head. "Perhaps," he said, "but I can't bear to think of the hurt heart of my little Leila."

"They should never have been engaged," Gordon said, "but it won't make matters any better to let things go on. If Leila doesn't marry Barry, she won't have to bear the burdens he will surely bring to her. She'd better be unhappy with you to take care of her, than tied to him and unhappy."

"But I'm an old man, and she is such a child. Life for me is so short, and for her so long."

"We must do what seems best for the moment, and let the future take care of itself. Barry's only a boy. They are neither of them ready for marriage—a few years of waiting won't hurt them."

It was in this strain that Gordon talked to Barry.

"It won't hurt you to wait."

"Wait for what?" Barry flamed; "until Leila wears her heart out? Until you teach her that I'm not—fit? Until somebody else comes along and steals her, while I'm gone?"

"Is that the opinion you have of her constancy?"

"No," Barry said, huskily, "she's as true as steel. But I can't see the use of this, Gordon. If I marry Leila, she'll make a man of me."

"She hasn't changed you during these last months," Gordon stated, inexorably, "and you mustn't run the risk of making her unhappy. It is a mere business proposition that I am putting before you, Barry. You must be able to support a wife before you marry one, and Washington isn't the place for you to start. In a business like ours, a man must be at his best. You are wasting your time here, and you've acquired the habit of sociability, which is just a habit, but it grows and will end by paralyzing your forces. A man who's always ready to be with the crowd isn't the man that's ready for work, and he isn't the man who's usually onto his job. I am putting this not from any moral or spiritual ideal, but from the commercial. The man who wins out isn't the one with his brain fuddled; he's the one with his brain clear. Business to-day is too keen a game for any one to play who isn't willing to be at it all the time."

Thus practical common sense met the boy at every turn. And he was forced at last for pride's sake to consent to Gordon's plans for him. But he had gone to Mary, raging. "Is he going to run our lives?"

"He is doing it for your good, Barry."

"Why can't I go South with Roger Poole?—if I must go away? He told me of a man who stayed in the woods with him."

"That would simply be temporary, and it would delay matters. Gordon's idea is that in this way you'll be established in business. If you went South you'd be without any remunerative occupation."

"Doesn't Poole make a living down there?"

"He hasn't yet. He's to try story-writing."

"Are you corresponding with him, Mary?"

Resenting his catechism, she forced herself to say, quietly, "We write now and then."

"What does Porter think of that?"

"Porter hasn't anything to do with it."

"He has, too. You know you'll marry him, Mary."

"I shall not. I haven't the least idea of marrying Porter."

"Then why do you let him hang around you?"

"Barry," she was blazing, "I don't let him hang around. He comes as he has always come—to see us all."

"Do you think for a moment that he'd come if it weren't for you? He isn't craving my society, or Aunt Isabelle's, or Susan Jenks'."

Barry was glad to blame somebody else for something—he was aware of himself as the blackest sheep in the fold, but let those who had other sins hear them.

He flung himself away from her—out of the house. And for days he did not come home. They kept the reason of his absence from Leila, and as far as they could from Constance. But Mary went nearly wild with anxiety, and she found in Gordon a strength and a resourcefulness on which she leaned.

When Barry came back, he offered no further objections to their plans. Yet they could see that he was consenting to his exile only because he had no argument with which to meet theirs. He refused to resign from the Patent Office until the last moment, as if hoping for some reprieve from the sentence which his family had pronounced. He was moody, irritable, a changed boy from the one who had hippity-hopped with Leila on Constance's wedding night.

Even Leila saw the change. "Barry, dear," she said one evening as she sat beside him in her father's library, "Barry—is it because you hate to leave—me?"

He turned to her almost fiercely. "If I had a penny of my own, Leila, I'd pick you up, and we'd go to the ends of the earth together."

And she responded breathlessly, "It would be heavenly, Barry."

He dallied with temptation. "If we were married, no one could take you away from me."

"No one will ever take me away."

"I know. But they might try to make you give me up."

"Why should they?"

"They'll say that I'm not worthy—that I'm a poor idiot who can't earn a living for his wife."

"Oh, Barry," she whispered, "how can any one say such things?" She knelt on a little stool beside him, and her brown hair curled madly about her pink cheeks. "Oh, Barry," she said again, "why not—why not get married now, and show them that we can live on what you make, and then you needn't go—away."

He caught at that hope. "But, sweetheart, you'd be—poor."

"I'd have you."

"I couldn't take you to our old house. It—belongs to Mary. Father knew that Constance was to be married, so he tried to provide for Mary until she married; after that the property will be divided between the two girls. He felt that I was a man, and he spent what money he had for me on my education."

"I don't want to live in Mary's house. We could live with Dad."

"No," sharply. Barry had been hurt when the General had seemed to agree so entirely with Gordon. He had expected the offer of a place in the General's office, and it had not come.

"If we marry, darling," he said, "we must go it alone. I won't be dependent on any one."

"We could have a little apartment," her eyes were shining, "and Dad would furnish it for us, and Susan Jenks could teach me to cook and she could tell me your favorite things, and we'd have them, and it would be like a story book. Barry, please."

He, too, thought it would be like a story book. Other people had done such things and had been happy. And once at the head of his own household he would show them that he was a man.

Yet he tried to put her away from him. "I must not. It wouldn't be right."

But as the days went on, and the time before his departure grew short, he began to ask himself, "Why not?"

And it was thus, with Romance in the lead, with Love urging them on, and with Ignorance and Innocence and Impetuosity hand in hand, that, at last, in the madness of a certain March moon, Leila and Barry ran away.

Leila had a friend in Rockville—an old school friend whom she often visited. Barry knew Montgomery County from end to end. He had fished and hunted in its streams, he had motored over its roads, he had danced and dined at its country houses, he had golfed at its country clubs, he had slept at its inns and worshiped in its churches.

So it was to Montgomery County and its county seat that they looked for their Gretna Green, and one night Leila kissed her father wistfully, and told him that she was going to see Elizabeth Dean.

"Just for Saturday, Dad. I'll go Friday night, and come back in time for dinner Saturday."

"Why not motor out?"

"The train will be easier. And I'll telephone you when I get there."

She took chances on the telephoning—for had he called her up, he would have found that she did not reach Rockville on Friday night, nor was she expected by Elizabeth Dean until Saturday in time for lunch.

There was thus an evening and a night and the morning of the next day in which Little-Lovely Leila was to be lost to the world.

She took the train for Rockville, but stopped at a station half-way between that town and Washington, and there Barry met her. They had dinner at the little station restaurant—a wonderful dinner of ham and eggs and boiled potatoes, but the wonderfulness had nothing to do with the food; it had to do rather with Little-Lovely Leila's shining eyes and blushes, and Barry's abounding spirits. He was like a boy out of school. He teased Leila and wrote poetry on the fly-specked dinner card, reading it out loud to her, reveling in her lovely confusion.

When they finished, Leila telephoned to her father that she had arrived at Rockville and was safe. If her voice wavered a little as she said it, if her eyes filled at the trustfulness of his affectionate response, these things were soon forgotten, as Barry caught up her little bag, and they left the station, and started over the hills in search of happiness.

The way was rather long, but they had thought it best to avoid trolley or train or much-traveled roads, lest they be recognized. And so it came about that they crossed fields, and slipped through the edges of groves, and when the twilight fell Little-Lovely Leila danced along the way, and Barry danced, too, until the moon came up round and gold above the blackness of the distant hills.

Once they came to a stream that was like silver, and once they passed through a ghostly orchard with budding branches, and once they came to a farmhouse where a dog barked at them, and the dog and the orchard and the budding trees and the stream all seemed to be saying:

"You are running away—-you are running away."

And now they had walked a mile, and there was yet another.

"But what's a mile?" said Barry, and Little-Lovely Leila laughed.

She wore a frock of pale yellow, with a thick warm coat of the same fashionable color. Her hat was demurely tied under her little chin with black velvet ribbons. She was like a primrose of the spring—and Barry kissed her.

"May I tell Dad, when I get home to-morrow night?" she asked.

"We'll wait until Sunday. April Fool's Day, Leila. We'll tell him, and he will think it's a joke. And when he sees how happy we are, he will know we were right."

So like children they refused to let the thought of the future mar the joy of the present.

Once they rested on a fallen log in a little grove of trees. The wind had died down, and the air was warm, with the still warmth of a Southern spring. Between the trees they could see a ribbon of white road which wound up to a shadowy church.

"The minister's house is next to the church," Barry told her; "in a half hour from now you'll be mine, Leila. And no one can take you away from me."

In the wonder of that thought they were silent for a time, then:

"How strange it will seem to be married, Barry."

"It seems the most natural thing in the world to me. But there will be those who will say I shouldn't have let you."

"I let myself. It wasn't you. Did you want my heart to break at your going, Barry?"

For a moment he held her in his arms, then he kissed her, gently, and let her go. When they came back this way, she would be his wife.

The old minister asked few questions. He believed in youth and love; the laws of the state were lenient. So with the members of his family for witnesses, he declared in due time that this man and woman were one, and again they went forth into the moonlight.

And now there was another little journey, up one hill and down another to a quaint hostelry—almost empty of guests in this early season.

A competent little landlady and an old colored man led them to the suite for which Barry had telephoned. The little landlady smiled at Leila and showed the white roses which Barry had sent for her room, and the old colored man lighted all the candles.

There was a supper set out on the table in their sitting-room, with cold roast chicken and hot biscuits, a bottle of light wine, and a round cake with white frosting.

Leila cut the cake. "To think that I should have a wedding cake," she said to Barry.

So they made a feast of it, but Barry did not open the bottle of wine until their supper was ended. Then he poured two glasses.

"To you," he whispered, and smiled at his bride.

Then before his lips could touch it, he set the glass down hastily, so that it struck against the bottle and broke, and the wine stained the white cloth.

Leila looking up, startled, met a strange look. "Barry," she whispered, "Barry, dear boy."

He rose and blew out the candles.

"Let me tell you—in the dark," he said. "You've got to know, Leila."

And in the moonlight he told her why they had wanted him to go away.

"It is because I've got to fight—devils."

At first she did not understand. But he made her understand.

She was such a little thing in her yellow gown. So little and young to deal with a thing like this.

But in that moment the child became a woman. She bent over him.

"My husband," she said, "nothing can ever part us now, Barry."

So love taught her what to say, and so she comforted him.

The next morning Elizabeth Dean met Leila Dick at the station. That she was really meeting Leila Ballard was a thing, of course, of which she had no knowledge. But Leila was acutely conscious of her new estate. It seemed to her that the motor horn brayed it, that the birds sang it, that the cows mooed it, that the dogs barked it, "Leila Ballard, Leila Ballard, Leila Ballard, wife of Barry—you're not Leila Dick, you're not, you're not, you're not."

"I never knew you to be so quiet," Elizabeth said at last, curiously. "What's the matter?"

Leila brought herself back with an effort. "I like to listen," she said, "but I am usually such a chatterbox that people won't believe it."

Somehow she managed to get through that day. Somehow she managed to greet and meet the people who had been invited to the luncheon which was given in her honor. But while in body she was with them, in spirit she was with Barry. Barry was her husband—her husband who loved her and needed her in his life.

His confession of the night before had brought with it no deadening sense of hopelessness. To her, any future with Barry was rose-colored.

But it had changed her attitude toward him in this, that she no longer adored him as a strong young god who could stand alone, and whom she must worship because of his condescension in casting his eyes upon her.

He needed her! He needed little Leila Dick! And the thought gave to her marriage a deeper meaning than that of mere youthful raptures.

He had put her on the train that morning reluctantly, and had promised to call her up the moment she reached town.

So her journey toward Washington on the evening train was an hour of anticipation. To those who rode with her, she seemed a very pretty and self-contained young person making a perfectly proper and commonplace trip on the five o'clock express—in her own mind, she was set apart from all the rest by the fact of her transcendant romance.

Her father met her at the station and put her into a taxi. All the way home she sat with her hand in his.

"Did you have a good time?" he asked.

"Heavenly, Dad."

They ate dinner together, and she talked of her day, wishing that there was nothing to keep from him, wishing that she might whisper it to him now. She had no fear of his disapproval. Dad loved her.

No call had come from Barry. She finished dinner and wandered restlessly from room to room.

When nine o'clock struck, she crept into the General's library, and found him in his big chair reading and smoking.

She sat on a little stool beside him, and laid her head against his knee. Presently his hand slipped from his book and touched her curls. And then both sat looking into the fire.

"If your mother had lived, my darling," the old man said, "she would have made things easier for you."

"About Barry's going away?"

"Yes."

"It seems silly for him to go, Dad. Surely there's something here for him to do."

"Gordon thinks that the trip will bring out his manhood, make him less of a boy."

"I don't think Gordon understands Barry."

"And you do, baby? I'm afraid you spoil him."

"Nobody could spoil Barry."

"Don't love him too much."

"As if I could."

"I'm not sure," the old man said, shrewdly, "that you don't. And no man's worth it. Most of us are selfish pigs—we take all we can get—and what we give is usually less than we ask in return."

But now she was smiling into the fire. "You gave mother all that you had to give, Dad, and you made her happy."

"Yes, thank God," and now there were tears on the old cheeks; "for the short time that I had her—I made her happy."

When Barry came, he found her curled up in her father's arms. Over her head the General smiled at this boy who was some day to take her from him.

But Barry did not smile. He greeted the General, and when Leila came to him, tremulously self-conscious, he did not meet her eyes, but he took her hand in his tightly, while he spoke to her father.

"You won't mind, General, if I carry Leila off to the other room. I've a lot of things to say to her."

"Of course not. I was in love once myself, Barry."

They went into the other room. It was a long and formal parlor with crystal chandeliers and rose-colored stuffed furniture and gilt-framed mirrors. It had been furnished by the General's mother, and his little wife had loved it and had kept it unchanged.