The thought was vaguely comforting and he, too, fell adreaming.  Most of us foiled humans learn to play the game of make-believe and to find such consolation as we may therein.  Often and often in his lonely hours Dick Carson had summoned Tony Holiday to his side, a Tony as bright and beautiful and all adorable as the real Tony, but a dream Tony, withal, a Tony who loved him even as he loved her.  And in his make-believe he was no longer a nameless, impecunious cub reporter, but a man who had arrived somewhere, made himself worthy, so far as any mere man could, of the supreme gift of Tony’s caring.

To-night, too, Dick played the game determinedly, but somehow he found its consolation rather meager, as cold and remote as the sparkle of the June stars, millions of miles away up there in the velvet sky, after having sat by the side of the living, breathing Tony and, looking into her happy eyes, known how little, how very little, he was in her thoughts.  She liked him to be near her, he knew, just as she liked her roses to be fragrant, but neither the roses nor himself was a vital necessity to her.  She could do very well without either.  That was the pity of it.

At last he got up and went to bed.  Falling into troubled sleep he dreamed that he and Tony were wandering, hand in hand, in the Forest of Arden.  From afar off came the sound of music, airy voices chanting: 

“When birds do sing, hey ding a ding
Sweet lovers love the spring.”

And then somebody laughed mockingly, like Jacques, and somebody else, clad in motley like Touchstone, but who seemed to speak in Dick’s own voice, murmured, “Ay, now am I in Arden, the more fool I.”

And even with these words the forest vanished and Tony with it and the dreamer was left alone on a steep and dusty road, lost and aching for the missing touch of her hand.

But later he woke to the song of a thousand birds greeting the new day with full-throated joy.  And his heart, too, began to sing.  For it was indeed a new day—­a day in which he should see Tony.  He was irrationally content.  Of such is the kingdom of lad’s love!

CHAPTER III

A GIRL WHO COULDN’T STOP BEING A PRINCESS

In the lee of a huge gray bowlder on the summit of Mount Tom sat Philip Lambert and Carlotta Cressy.  Below them stretched the wide sweep of the river valley, amethyst and topaz and emerald, rich with lush June verdure, soft shadowed, tranquil, in the late afternoon sunshine.  They had been silent for a little time but suddenly Carlotta broke the silence.

“Phil, do you know why I brought you up here?” she asked.  As she spoke she drew a little closer to him and her hand touched his as softly as a drifting feather or a blown cherry blossom might have touched it.