She reached out and touched his shoulder with her hand. "How good you are," she said, wistfully, "to take all of this trouble for us. I feel that I ought not to let you do it—and yet—we are so helpless, Aunt Isabelle and I."
There was nothing of the boy about her now. She was all clinging dependent woman. And the touch of her hand on his shoulder was the sword of the queen conferring knighthood. What cared he now for a rose?
So he left her, standing there in the moonlight, and when he reached the bottom of the hill, he turned and looked back, and she still stood above him, and as she saw him turn, she waved her hand.
In days of old, knights fought with dragons and cut off their heads, only to find that other heads had grown to replace those which had been destroyed.
And it was such dragons of doubt and despair which Roger Poole fought in the days after he had found Barry.
The boy had hidden himself in a small hotel in the down-town district of Baltimore. Following one clue and then another, Roger had come upon him. There had been no explanations. Barry had seemed to take his rescue as a matter of course, and to be glad of some one into whose ears he could pour the litany of his despair.
"It's no use, Poole. I've fought and fought. Father helped me. And I promised Con. And I thought that my love for Leila would make me strong. But there's no use trying. I'll be beaten. It is in the blood. I had an uncle who drank himself to death. And back of him there was a grandfather."
They had been together for two days. Barry had agreed to Roger's plans for a trip to the country, and now they were under the trees on the banks of one of the little brackish rivers which flow into the Chesapeake. They had fished a little in the early morning, then had brought their boat in, for Barry had grown tired of the sport. He wanted to talk about himself.
"It's no use," he said again; "it's in the blood."
Roger was propped against a tree, his hat off, his dark hair blown back from his fine thin face.