Leila looking up, startled, met a strange look. "Barry," she
whispered, "Barry, dear boy."
He rose and blew out the candles.
"Let me tell you--in the dark," he said. "You've got to know, Leila."
And in the moonlight he told her why they had wanted him to go away.
"It is because I've got to fight--devils."
At first she did not understand. But he made her understand.
She was such a little thing in her yellow gown. So little and young to
deal with a thing like this.
But in that moment the child became a woman. She bent over him.
"My husband," she said, "nothing can ever part us now, Barry."
So love taught her what to say, and so she comforted him.
The next morning Elizabeth Dean met Leila Dick at the station. That
she was really meeting Leila Ballard was a thing, of course, of which
she had no knowledge. But Leila was acutely conscious of her new
estate. It seemed to her that the motor horn brayed it, that the birds
sang it, that the cows mooed it, that the dogs barked it, "Leila
Ballard, Leila Ballard, Leila Ballard, wife of Barry--you're not Leila
Dick, you're not, you're not, you're not."
"I never knew you to be so quiet," Elizabeth said at last, curiously.
"What's the matter?"
Leila brought herself back with an effort. "I like to listen," she
said, "but I am usually such a chatterbox that people won't believe it."
Somehow she managed to get through that day. Somehow she managed to
greet and meet the people who had been invited to the luncheon which
was given in her honor. But while in body she was with them, in spirit
she was with Barry. Barry was her husband--her husband who loved her
and needed her in his life.
His confession of the night before had brought with it no deadening
sense of hopelessness. To her, any future with Barry was rose-colored.
But it had changed her attitude toward him in this, that she no longer
adored him as a strong young god who could stand alone, and whom she
must worship because of his condescension in casting his eyes upon her.
He needed her! He needed little Leila Dick! And the thought gave to
her marriage a deeper meaning than that of mere youthful raptures.
He had put her on the train that morning reluctantly, and had promised
to call her up the moment she reached town.
So her journey toward Washington on the evening train was an hour of
anticipation. To those who rode with her, she seemed a very pretty and
self-contained young person making a perfectly proper and commonplace
trip on the five o'clock express--in her own mind, she was set apart
from all the rest by the fact of her transcendant romance.