He stared at her blankly. Then she roused herself. “It’s unnecessary—this dying,” she broke out.
“In this instance criminal. A filthy disease to conquer so great a human force!” Barry declared with bitter passion. “If death didn’t break one’s heart, it would make one insane with anger. He had good doctors, too,” he reflected gloomily.
“But doctors can only go so far. Then you strike the dark border where unfathomable mystery lies; the door-step of the unknown, where accident, chance, the turn of a hair—and, yes, miracle intervenes. Nobody can penetrate there. If only one could!” She leaned earnestly toward him, the light coming into her face.
“Yes,” he meditated gently, “all life hangs on a miracle. Yet,” he exclaimed somberly, “I think he is to be envied in passing out before the great débâcle. You couldn’t have turned his footsteps from these shores, and he couldn’t have borne to sit among the ashes of such big hopes.”
Julie had never seen Barry look so worried, as if a blow had been struck across a vital part of him. Other people were always weary in spots, or altogether; but he had been undaunted in harness, campaigning joyously against the obstacles of the East. Soul-stirring, world-overturning Barry, who had set his tireless shoulder to every load! His heart must not break!
Often lately in their evening drives over a moon-enchanted city, a city with all her sad secrets hid and along the great ocean lying like a sector of eternity against poetically silvered mortal shores, she had seen him strain about and look over it all and sink back with a bitter sigh. She had read all the heaviness that lay in his soul at these times.
“I say, and I will continue to say to my last breath, that we were winning Asia step by step. Over in China, they are beginning to strew the dynamite that will blow the old order of things off the globe. It makes me too angry to speak of it! And I ask you, Julie, if the Gods have given me a square deal? Isabel’s Green God will win the day, curse him!”
Julie looked at him searchingly. “Isabel is a great friend of yours, isn’t she, Barry?”
“She works against me, and tries to upset everything I do; but she still manages to convey the intimation that she means well toward me.”
“But what do you think she finally does mean towards you?”