"But if I could convince him——"
"Of what?" gravely. "That you think him a boy? Perhaps that would tend to weaken his powers."
"Then I must fold my hands?"
"Yes. As things are now—I should wait."
He did not explain, and she did not ask, for what she should wait. It was as if they both realized that the test would come, and that it would come in time.
And it did come.
It was while Leila was on a trip to the Maine coast with her father.
July was waning, and already an August sultriness was in the air. Those who were left in town were the workers—every one who could get away was gone. Mary, with the care of her house on her hands, refused Aunt Frances' invitation for a month by the sea, and Aunt Isabelle declined to leave her.
"I like it better here, even with the heat," she told her niece, "than running around Bar Harbor with Frances and Grace."
Barry wrote voluminous letters to Leila, and received in return her dear childish scrawls. But the strain of her absence began to tell on him. He began to feel the pull toward old pleasures and distractions. Then one day Jerry Tuckerman arrived on the scene. The next night, he and Barry and the other radiant musketeers motored over to Baltimore by moonlight. Barry did not come home the next day, nor the next, nor the next. Mary grew white and tense, and manufactured excuses which did not deceive Aunt Isabelle. Neither of the tired pale women spoke to each other of their vigils. Neither of them spoke of the anxiety which consumed them.