When Barry came back, he offered no further objections to their plans. Yet they could see that he was consenting to his exile only because he had no argument with which to meet theirs. He refused to resign from the Patent Office until the last moment, as if hoping for some reprieve from the sentence which his family had pronounced. He was moody, irritable, a changed boy from the one who had hippity-hopped with Leila on Constance's wedding night. Even Leila saw the change. "Barry, dear," she said one evening as she sat beside him in her father's library, "Barry--is it because you hate to leave--me?" He turned to her almost fiercely. "If I had a penny of my own, Leila, I'd pick you up, and we'd go to the ends of the earth together." And she responded breathlessly, "It would be heavenly, Barry." He dallied with temptation. "If we were married, no one could take you away from me." "No one will ever take me away." "I know. But they might try to make you give me up." "Why should they?" "They'll say that I'm not worthy--that I'm a poor idiot who can't earn a living for his wife." "Oh, Barry," she whispered, "how can any one say such things?" She knelt on a little stool beside him, and her brown hair curled madly about her pink cheeks. "Oh, Barry," she said again, "why not--why not get married now, and show them that we can live on what you make, and then you needn't go--away." He caught at that hope. "But, sweetheart, you'd be--poor." "I'd have you." "I couldn't take you to our old house. It--belongs to Mary. Father knew that Constance was to be married, so he tried to provide for Mary until she married; after that the property will be divided between the two girls. He felt that I was a man, and he spent what money he had for me on my education." "I don't want to live in Mary's house. We could live with Dad." "No," sharply. Barry had been hurt when the General had seemed to agree so entirely with Gordon. He had expected the offer of a place in the General's office, and it had not come. "If we marry, darling," he said, "we must go it alone. I won't be dependent on any one." "We could have a little apartment," her eyes were shining, "and Dad would furnish it for us, and Susan Jenks could teach me to cook and she could tell me your favorite things, and we'd have them, and it would be like a story book. Barry, please." He, too, thought it would be like a story book. Other people had done such things and had been happy. And once at the head of his own household he would show them that he was a man. Yet he tried to put her away from him. "I must not. It wouldn't be right." But as the days went on, and the time before his departure grew short, he began to ask himself, "Why not?" And it was thus, with Romance in the lead, with Love urging them on, and with Ignorance and Innocence and Impetuosity hand in hand, that, at last, in the madness of a certain March moon, Leila and Barry ran away.