“Tony, dear, I am going to surprise you,” he said suddenly breaking the silence.  “I have decided to go to Mexico.”

“To go to Mexico!  Alan!  Why?”

Tony drew away from her companion to study his face, with amazement on her own.

“To find Carson and look after him.  Why else?”

“But your exhibition?  You can’t go away now, Alan, even if I would let you go to Dick that way.”

“Oh, yes I can.  The arrangements are all made.  Van Slyke can handle the last stages of the thing far better than I can.  I loathe hanging round and hearing the fools rant about my stuff and wonder what the devil I meant by this or that or if I didn’t mean anything.  I am infinitely better off three thousand miles away.”

“But even so—­I don’t want to hurt you or act as if I didn’t appreciate what you are offering to do—­but you hate Dick.  I don’t see how you could help him.”

“I don’t hate him any more, Tony.  At least I don’t think I do.  At any rate whether I do or don’t won’t make the slightest bit of difference.  I shall look after him as well as your uncle or your brothers would—­better perhaps because I know Mexico well and how to get things done down there.  I know how to get things done in most places.”

“Oh, I know.  I have often thought you must have magic at your command the way people fly to do your bidding.  It is startling but it is awfully convenient.”

“Money magic mostly,” he retorted grimly.

“Partly, not mostly.  You are a born potentate.  You must have been a sultan or a pashaw or something in some previous incarnation.  I don’t care what you are if you will find Dick and see that he gets well.  Alan, don’t you think—­couldn’t I—­wouldn’t it be better—­if I went too?”

There was a sudden gleam in Alan’s eyes.  The hour was his.  He could take advantage of the situation, of the girl’s anxiety for his cousin, her love for himself while it was at high tide as it was at this over stimulated hour of excitement.  He could marry her.  And once the rite was spoken—­not John Massey—­not all Holiday Hill combined could take her from him.  She would be his and his alone to the end.  Tony was ripe for madness to-night, overwrought, ready to take any wild leap in the dark with him.  He could make her his.  He felt the intoxicating truth quiver in the touch of her hand, read it in her eager, dark eyes lifted to his for his answer.

Alan Massey was unused to putting away temptation but this, perhaps the biggest and blackest that had ever assailed him he put by.

“No, dear I’ll go alone,” he said.  “You will just have to trust me, Tony.  I swear I’ll do everything in the world that can be done for Carson.  Let us have just one dance though.  I should like it to remember—­in Mexico.”

Tony hesitated.  It was very late.  The Hostelry would ill approve of her going anywhere to dance at such an hour.  It ill approved of Alan Massey any way.  Still—­