back, five, six generations, some ancestor of this lad
may have drifted into London town, perhaps the bells sang to him, and
subconsciously this sand-hill child was illumined by that inherited
memory. Somewhere in the back of his mind bells have been chiming, and
he has not known enough to call them bells. However that may be, my
verses revealed to him a new heaven and a new earth.

Without knowing anything, he is ready for everything. Perhaps there
are others like him. Cousin Patty says there are girls. She insists
that the girls need cook-books, not poetry, but I am not sure.

I shall go again to the pines, and teach that boy first by telling him
things, then I shall take books. I haven't been as interested in
anything for years as I am in that boy.

So, will you think of me as seeing, faintly, the Vision? Your eyes are
clearer than mine. You can see farther; and what you see, will you
tell me?

And now about Barry. I know how hard it is to have him leave you, and
that under all your talk of trumpets blowing and flags flying, there's
the ache and the heart-break. I cannot see why such things should come
to you. The rest of us probably deserve what we get. But you--I
should like to think of you always as in a garden--you have the power
to make things bloom. You have even quickened the dry dust of my own
dead life, so that now in it there's a little plot of the pansies of my
thoughts of you, and there's rosemary, for remembrance, and there's the
little bed of my interest in that boy--what seeds did you plant for it?

It is raining here to-night. I wonder it the rain is beating on the
windows of the Tower Rooms, and if you are snug within, with Pittiwitz
purring and the fire snapping, and I wonder if throughout all that rain
you are sending any thought to me.

Perhaps I shouldn't ask it. But I do ask for another letter. What the
last was to me I have told you. I shall live on the hope of the next.

Faithfully and gratefully always,

ROGER POOLE.

CHAPTER XV

_In Which Barry and Leila Go Over the Hills and Far Away; and in Which
a March Moon Becomes a Honeymoon._

The news that Barry must go away had been a blow to Leila's childish
dreams of immediate happiness. She knew that Barry was bitter, that he
rebelled against the plans which were being made for him, but she did
not know that Gordon had told the General frankly and flatly the reason
for this delay in the matrimonial arrangem