Dick interposed. "Her adventures have all been joyous."

"But they haven't," Leila insisted. "I'm no spoiled darling of the gods.
I've been poor, poor as that girl out there. I've had heartaches, and
disappointments, and misfortunes."

"Not vital ones," Dick declared. "You've never had a knock-out blow."

"She doesn't know what one is," Standish laughed, but there sounded a
ruefulness in his laughter that told of the kind of blow he must once
have suffered to bring that note in his voice. Standish Burton took life
lightly, except where Leila was concerned. His manner now indicated,
almost mysteriously, that something threatened his harbor of peace, but
the regard Leila gave to him proved that the threat of impending danger
had not come to her.

"Oh, but I do know," she persisted.

"Vicariously," I suggested. "All artists do."

"No, actually," she said.

"You're wrong," said Standish. "You're the sort of woman whom the world
saves from its own cruelties."

There was something so essentially true in his appraisal of his wife
that the certainty covered the banality of his statement and kept Dick
and myself in agreement with him. Leila Burton, exquisitely remote from
all things commonplace, was unquestionably a woman to be protected.
Without envy--since my own way had its compensations in full measure--I
admitted it.

"I think that you must have forgotten, if you ever knew," she said, "how
I struggled here in London for the little recognition I have won."

"Oh, that!" Dick Allport deprecated. "That isn't what Stan means. Every
one in the world worth talking about goes through that sort of struggle.
He means the flinging down from a high mountain after you've seen the
glories, not of this world, but of another, the casting out from
paradise after you've learned what paradise may mean. He spoke with an
odd timbre of emotion in his voice, a quality that puzzled me for the
moment.

"That's it," said Standish, gratefully. "Those are the knock-out blows."

"Well, then, I don't know them"--Leila admitted her defeat--"and I hope
that I shall not."

Softly she began to play the music of an accompaniment. There was a
familiar hauntingness in its strains that puzzled me until I associated
them with the song that Burton used to whistle so often in the times
when Leila was in Paris and he had turned for companionship to Dick and
to me.

"I've heard Stan murder that often enough to be able to try it myself,"
I told her.