“I think we may safely promise that and thank you.  Tony and I both appreciate that you are doing her a good deal of honor for one small school girl, eh Tony?” The doctor smiled down at his flushed, starry-eyed niece.  He understood precisely what a big moment it was for her.

“Oh, I should think so!” sighed Tony.  “You are awfully kind, Mr. Hempel.  It is like a wonderful dream—­almost too good to be true.”

Both men smiled at that.  For youth no dream is quite too extravagant or incredible to be potentially true.  No grim specters of failure and disillusionment and frustration dog its bright path.  All possibilities are its divine inheritance.

“Mr. Hempel, did you know my mother?” Tony asked suddenly, with a shadow of wistfulness in her dark eyes.  There were so few people whom she met that had known her mother.  It was as if Laura LaRue had moved in a different orbit from that of her daughter.  It always hurt Tony to feel that.  But here was one who was of her mother’s own world.  No wonder her eyes were beseeching as they sought the great manager’s.

He bowed gravely.

“I knew her very well.  She was one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen—­and one of the greatest actresses.  Your father was a lucky man, my dear.  Few women would have given up for any man what she gave up for him.”

“Oh, but—­she loved him,” explained Laura LaRue’s daughter simply.

Again Hempel nodded.

“She did,” he admitted grimly.  After all these years there was no use admitting that that had been the deepest rub of all, that Laura had loved Ned Holiday and had never, for even the span of a moment, thought of caring for himself.  “I repeat, your father was a very lucky man—­a damnably lucky one.”

And with that they shook hands and parted.

It was many months before Tony was to see Max Hempel again and many waters were to run under the bridge before the meeting came to pass.

Outside in the car, Ted, Dick and the twins waited the arrival of the heroine of the evening.  The three latter greeted her with a burst of prideful congratulation; the former, being merely a brother, was distinctly cross at having been kept waiting so long and did not hesitate to express his sentiments fully out loud.  But Doctor Holiday cut short his nephew’s somewhat ungracious speech by a quiet reminder that the car was here primarily for Tony’s use, and the boy subsided, having no more to say until, having deposited the occupants of the car at their various destinations, he announced to his uncle with elaborate carelessness that he would take the car around to the garage.

But he did not turn in at the side street where the garage was.  Instead he shot out Elm Street, “hitting her up” at forty.  There had been a reason for his impatience.  Ted Holiday had important private business to transact ere cock crow.