"How lovely. Have you told her?"
"No--I thought it would be a grand surprise."
"Tell her now, dear General. She needs to look forward."
So the General, who had been kept in the house nearly all winter by his
rheumatism, spoke of certain baths in Germany.
"I thought I'd go over and try them," he informed his small daughter,
on the day after his talk with Mary, "and you could stop and call on
Barry."
"Barry!" She made a little rush toward him. "Dad, Dad, do you mean
it?"
"Yes."
She tucked her head into his shoulder and cried for happiness. "Dad,
I've missed him so."
With this hope held out to her, Little-Lovely Leila grew radiant. Once
more her feet danced along the halls, and the music of her voice
trilled bird-like in the big rooms.
Delilah, discussing it with her artist, said: "Leila makes me believe
in Romance with a big R. But I couldn't love like that."
Colin smiled. "You'd love like a lioness. I've subdued you outwardly,
but within you are still primitive."
"I wonder----" Delilah mused.
"The man for you," Colin turned to her suddenly, "is Porter Bigelow.
Of course I'm taking it from the artist's point of view. You're made
for each other--a pair of young gods--his red head just topping your
black one--It was that way at the garden party; any one could see it."
Delilah laughed. "His eyes aren't for me. With him it is Mary
Ballard. If I were in love with him, I should hate Mary. But I don't;
I love her. And she's in love with Roger Poole."
Colin looked up from the samples from which he and Delilah were
choosing her spring wardrobe.
"Poole? I knew his wife," he said abruptly; "it was her picture that I
showed you the other night--the little saint in the Fra Angelico
pose--it didn't come to me until afterward that he might be the same
Poole of whom I had heard you speak."
Delilah swept across the room, and turned the canvas outward. "Roger
Poole's wife," she said, "of all things!" Then she stood staring
silently.
"You didn't tell us who she was."
"No," he was weighing mentally Porter's attitude in the matter, "no one
knew but Bigelow."
"And he showed this to Mary?" They looked at each other, and laughed.
"Perhaps all's fair in love," Delilah murmured, at last, "but I
wouldn't have believed it of him."