w more than that.

"I think we want our tea," he said, "while it is hot," and he handed
Delilah the cups, and busied himself to help her with the sugar and
lemon, and to pass the little cakes, and all the time he talked in his
pleasant half-cynical, half-earnest fashion, until their minds were
carried on to other things.

When at last they had gone, he came back to her quickly.

"What was it?" he asked. "What did you see in the ball?"

She shivered. "It was Barry. Oh, Colin, I don't really believe in
it--perhaps it was just my imagination because I am worried about
Leila, but I saw Barry looking at me with such a white strange face out
of the dark."

CHAPTER XXI

_In Which a Little Lady in Black Comes to Washington to Witness the
Swearing-in of a Gentleman and a Scholar._

It was in February that Roger wrote somewhat formally to ask if his
Cousin Patty might have a room in Mary's big house during the coming
inauguration.

"She is supremely happy over the Democratic victory, but in spite of
her advanced ideas, she is a timid little thing, and she has no
knowledge of big cities. I feel that many difficulties would be
avoided if you could take her in. I want her, too, to know you. I had
thought at first that I might come with her. But I think not. I am
needed here."

He did not say why he was needed. He said little of himself and of his
work. And Mary wondered. Had his enthusiasm waned? Was he, after
all, swayed by impulse, easily discouraged? Was Porter right, and was
Roger's failure in life due not to outside forces, but to weakness
within himself?

She wrote him that she should be glad to have Cousin Patty, and it was
on the first of March that Cousin Patty came.

Once in four years the capital city takes on a supreme holiday aspect.
In other years there may be parades, in other years there may be
pageants--it is an every-day affair, indeed, to hear up and down the
Avenue the beat of music, and the tramp of many feet. There are
funerals of great men, with gun carriages draped with the flag, and
with the Marine Band playing the "Dead March." There are gay
cavalcades rushing in from Fort Myer, to escort some celebrity; there
are pathetic files of black folk, gorgeous in the insignia of some
society which gives to its dead members the tribute of a
conspicuousness which they have never known in life. There are circus
parades, and suffrage parades, minstrel parades and parades of the bo