The garden was dead, and Mary was glad.  Dead gardens seemed to fit into her mood better than those which bloomed.  Resolutely she set herself to be cheerful; conscientiously, she told herself that she must live up to the theories which she had professed; sternly, she called herself to account that she did not exult in the freedom which she had craved.  Constantly her mind warred with her heart, and her heart won; and she faced the truth that all seasons would be dreary without Roger Poole.

Her letters to him of late had lacked the spontaneity which had at first characterized them.  She knew it, and tried to regain her old sense of ease and intimacy.  But the doubts which Porter had planted had borne fruit.  Always between her and Roger floated the vision of the little saint in red.

It was inevitable that Roger’s letters should change.  He ceased to show her the side which for a time he had so surprisingly revealed.  Their correspondence became perfunctory—­intermittent.

“It is my own fault,” Mary told herself, yet the knowledge did not make things easier.

And now began the winter of her discontent.  If any one had told her in her days of buoyant self-confidence that she would ever go to bed weary and wake up hopeless, she would have scorned the idea; yet the fact remained that the fruit of her independence was Dead Sea apples.

It was a letter from Barry which again brought her head up, and made her life march once more to a martial tune.

“I have found the work for which I am fitted,” he wrote; “you don’t know how good it seems.  For so many years I went to my desk like a boy driven to school.  But now—­why, I work after hours for the sheer love of it—­and because it seems to bring me nearer to Leila.”

This from Barry, the dawdler!  And she who had preached was whimpering about heat and cold, about long hours and hard work—­as if these things matter!

Why, life was a Great Adventure, and she had forgotten!

And now she began to look about her—­to find, if she could, some ray to illumine her workaday world.

She found it in the friendliness and companionship of her office comrades—­good comrades they were—­fighting the battle of drudgery shoulder to shoulder, sharing the fortunes of the road, needing, some of them, the uplift of her courage, giving some of them more than they asked.

As Mary grew into their lives, she grew away somewhat from her old crowd.  And if, at times, her gallant fight seemed futile—­if at times she could not still the cry of her heart, it was because she was a woman, made to be loved, fitted for finer things and truer things than writing cabalistic signs on a tablet and transcribing them, later, on the typewriter.

Leila had refused to be dropped from Mary’s life.  She came, whenever she could, to walk a part of the way home with her friend, and the two girls would board a car and ride to the edge of the town, preferring to tramp along the edges of the Soldiers’ Home or through the Park to the more formal promenade through the city streets.