So she packed her fragrant boxes—­so she embroidered, and sang, and dreamed.

Barry had written that he was “making good”; and that when she came he would tell Gordon.  And the General should go on to Germany, and he and Leila would have their honeymoon trip.

“You must decide where we shall go,” he had said, and Leila had planned joyously.

“Dad and I motored once into Scotland, and we stopped at a little town for tea.  Such a queer little story-book town, Barry, with funny houses and with the streets so narrow that the people leaned out of their windows and gossiped over our heads, and I am sure they could have shaken hands across.  There wasn’t even room for our car to turn around, and we had to go on and on until we came to the edge of the town, and there was the dearest inn.  We stopped and stayed that night—­and the linen all smelled of lavender, and there was a sweet dumpling of a landlady, and old-fashioned flowers in a trim little garden—­and all the hills beyond and a lake.  Let’s go there, Barry; it will be beautiful.”

They planned, too, to go into lodgings afterward in London.

The thought of lodgings gave Leila a thrill.  She hunted out her fat little volume of Martin Chuzzlewit and gloated over Ruth Pinch and her beef-steak pie.  She added two or three captivating aprons to the contents of the fragrant boxes.  She even bought a cook-book, and it was with a sigh that she laid the cook-book away when Barry wrote that in such lodgings as he would choose the landlady would serve their meals in the sitting-room.  And this plan would give Leila more time to see the sights of London!

But what cared Little-Lovely Leila for seeing sights?  Anybody could see sights—­any dreary and dried-up fossil, any crabbed and cranky old maid—­the Tower and Westminster Abbey were for those who had nothing better to do.  As for herself, her horizon just now was bounded by primrose wreaths and fragrant boxes, and the promise of seeing Barry in May!

But fate, which has strange things in store for all of us, had this in store for little Leila, that she was not to see Barry in May, and the reason that she was not to see him was Jerry Tuckerman.

Meeting Mary in the street one day early in February, Jerry had said, “I am going to run over to London this week.  Shall I take your best to Barry?”

Mary’s eyes had met his squarely.  “Be sure you take your best, Jerry,” she had said.

He had laughed his defiance.  “Barry’s all right—­but you’ve got to give him a little rope, Mary.”

When he had left her, Mary had walked on slowly, her heart filled with foreboding.  Barry was not like Jerry.  Jerry, coarse of fiber, lacking temperament, would probably come to middle age safely—­he would never be called upon to pay the piper as Barry would for dancing to the tune of the follies of youth.

She wrote to Gordon, warning him.  “Keep Barry busy,” she said.  “Jerry told me that he intended to have ’the time of his young life’—­and he will want Barry to share it.”