me,
dear one," Barry went on, "that I am strong."

She slipped her little hand into his. "Barry--it seems so queer to
think that I shall ever be--your wife."

"You had to be. It was meant from the--beginning."

"Was it, Barry?"

"Yes."

"And it will be to the end. Oh, I shall always love you, dearly,
dearly----"

It was idyllic, their little love affair--their big love affair, if one
judged by their measure. It was tender, sweet, and because it was
their secret, because there was no word of doubt or of distrust from
those who were older and wiser, they brought to it all the beauty of
youth and high hope.

Thus the spring came, and the early summer, and Barry passed his
examinations triumphantly, and came home one night and told Mary that
he was going to marry Leila Dick. As he told her his blue eyes
beseeched her, and loving him, and hating to hurt him, Mary withheld
the expression of her fears, and kissed him and cried a little on his
shoulder, and Barry patted her cheek, and said awkwardly: "I know you
think I'm not worthy of her, Mary. But she will make a man of me."

Alone, afterward, Mary wondered if she had been wise to acquiesce--yet
surely, surely, love was strong enough to lift a man up to a woman's
ideal--and Leila was such a--darling.

She put the question to Roger Poole that night. In these warmer days
she and Roger had slipped almost unconsciously into close intimacy. He
read to her for an hour after dinner, when she had no other
engagements, and often they sat in the old garden, she with her
note-book on the arm of the stone bench--he at the other end of the
bench, under a bush of roses of a hundred leaves. Sometimes Aunt
Isabelle was with them, with her fancy work, sometimes they were alone;
but always when the hour was over, he would close his book and ascend
to his tower, lest he might meet those who came later. There were many
nights that he thus escaped Porter Bigelow--nights when in the
moonlight he heard the murmur of voices, mingled with the splash of the
fountain; and there were other nights when gay groups danced upon the
lawn to the music played by Mary just within the open window.

Yet he thanked the gods for the part which he was allowed to play in
her life. He lived for that one hour out of the twenty-four. He dared
not think what a day would be if he were deprived of that precious
sixty minutes.

Now and then, when she had been very sure that no one would come, he