“Oh, no!” she answered, giving him a glimpse of serious eyes in the half-dark, “playtime doesn’t come back.  But, at least, I know what I want to do, and it will be more fun than any play.  One of the wisest men I ever knew set me thinking of these things.  He’s a sculptor, a great sculptor, and he lives in an olive garden in Italy, and eats what his peasants eat, and befriends them, and stands for their babies in baptism, and sits with them when they’re dying.  My father and I visited him about two years ago, and one day when he and I were taking a tramp, I suddenly burst out that I envied him.  I wanted to live in an olive garden, too, and wear faded blue clothes, and eat grapes, and tramp about the hills.  He said very simply that he had worked for twenty years to do it.  ‘You see, I’m a rich man,’ he said, ’and it seems that one must be rich in this world before one dare be poor from choice.  I couldn’t do this if people didn’t know that I could have an apartment in Paris, and servants, and motor-cars, and all the rest of it.  It would hurt my daughters and distress my friends.  There are hundreds and thousands of unhappy people in the world who can’t afford to be poor, and if ever you get a chance, you try it.  You’ll never be rich again.’  So I wrote him about a month ago that I had found my olive garden,” finished Sidney contentedly, “and was enjoying it.”

“Captain Burgoyne was older than you, Sid?” Barry questioned.  “Wouldn’t he have loved this sort of life?”

“Twenty years older, yes; but he wouldn’t have lived here for one day!” she answered vivaciously.  “He was a diplomat, a courtier to his finger-tips.  He was born to the atmosphere of hothouse flowers, and salons, and delightful little drawing-room plots and gossip.  He loved politics, and power, and women in full dress, and men with orders.  Of course I was very new to it all, but he liked to spoil me, draw me out.  If it hadn’t been for his accident, I never would have grown up at all, I dare say.  As it was, I was more like his mother.  We went to Washington for the season, New York for the opera, England for autumn visits, Paris for the spring:  I loved to make him happy, Barry, and he wasn’t happy except when we were going, going, going.  He was exceptionally popular; he had exceptional friends, and he couldn’t go anywhere without me.  My babies were with his mother—­”

She paused, turning a white rose between her fingers.  “And afterwards,” she said presently, “there was Father.  And Father never would spend two nights in the same place if he could help it,”

“I wasn’t drawn back here as you were,” said Barry thoughtfully, “I liked New York; I could have made good there if I’d had a chance.  It made me sick to give it up, then; but lately I’ve been feeling differently.  A newspaper’s a pretty influential thing, wherever it is.  I’ve been thinking about that clubhouse plan of yours; I wish to the Lord that we could do something for those