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