Only it was the first time that Barry had failed her.  He was gone.  Gone without a word of explanation to anyone, leaving his work at the Mail unfinished, leaving even Billy, his usual confidant, quite in the dark.  Sidney had noticed for days a certain moodiness and unresponsiveness about him; had tried rather timidly to win him from it; had got up uneasily half a dozen times in the night just past to look across the garden to his house, and wonder why Barry’s light burned on and on.

She had meant to send for him in the morning, but Billy, artlessly appearing when the waffles came on at breakfast, remarked that Dad was gone to San Francisco.

“To the city, Billy?” Sidney asked.  “Didn’t he say why?”

“He didn’t even say goodbye,” Billy replied cheerfully.  “He just left a note for Hayashi.  It said he didn’t know how long he would be gone.”

Sidney tried with small success to deceive herself into thinking that it was the mere mysteriousness of this that cut her.  She presently went down to see Mrs. Carew, and was fretted because that lady would for some time discuss nothing but the successful treatment of insects on the rose-bushes.

“Barry seems to have disappeared,” said Sidney finally, in a casual tone.

Mrs. Carew straightened up, forgot hellebore and tobacco juice for the moment.

“Did I tell you what Silva told me?” she asked.

“Silva?” echoed Sidney, at a loss.

“The milkman.  He told me that when he came up at five o’clock this morning, Barry came out of the gate, and that he looked awfully.  He said he was pale, and that his eyes looked badly, and that he hardly seemed to know what he was doing.  And oh, my dear, I’m afraid that he’s drinking again!  I’m sure of it.  It’s two years now since he has done this.  I think it’s too bad.  But you know he used to go down to town every little while for a regular time with those newspaper men.  He doesn’t like Santa Paloma, you know.  He gets very bored here.  He’ll be back in a day or two, thoroughly ashamed of himself.”

Sidney did not answer, because she could not.  Resentment and loyalty, shame and heartache, kept her lips dumb.  She walked to and fro in the garden, alone in the sweet early darkness, for an hour.  Then she went indoors, and tried to amuse herself at the piano.  Suddenly her face twisted, she laid her arm along the rack, and her face on her arm; but it was only for a moment; then she straightened up resolutely, piled the music, closed the piano, and went upstairs.

“But perhaps I’m not old enough yet for an olive garden,” she told the stars from her window an hour later.

CHAPTER XV