“They won’t,” said Jean in a queer, compressed little voice.

“Jean!  Was it you that fixed that bulletin?”

“Yes, it was.  I know it wasn’t a nice thing to do but I didn’t want them to scold you just now when you were so worried about Dick and everything.  I thought you would be in most any minute any way and I waited up myself to tell you how I loved the play and how proud I was of you.  Then when you didn’t come for so long I got really scared and then I fell asleep and—­”

Tony came over and stopped the older girl’s words with a kiss.

“You are a sweet peach, Jean Lambert, and I am awfully grateful to you for straining your conscience like that for my sake and awfully sorry I worried you.  I am afraid I always do worry good, sensible, proper people.  I’m made that way, mad north north west like Hamlet,” she added whimsically.  “Maybe we Holidays are all mad that much, excepting Uncle Phil of course.  He’s all that keeps the rest of us on the track of sanity at all.  But Alan is madder still.  Jean, he is going to Mexico to take care of Dick.”

“Mr. Massey is going to Mexico to take care of Dick!” Jean’ stared.  “Why, Tony—­I thought—­”

“Naturally.  So did I. Who wouldn’t think him the last person in the world to do a thing like that?  But he is going and it is his idea not mine.  I wanted to go too but he wouldn’t let me,” she added.

Jean gasped.

“Tony!  You would have married him when your uncle—­when everybody doesn’t want you to?”

To Jean Lambert’s well ordered, carefully fenced in mind such wild mental leaps as Tony Holiday’s were almost too much to contemplate.  But worse was to come.

“Married him!  Oh, I don’t know.  I didn’t think about that.  I would just have gone with him.  There wouldn’t have been time to get a license.  Of course I couldn’t though on account of the play.”

Jean gasped again.  If it hadn’t been for the play this astounding young person before her would have gone gallivanting off with one man to whom she was not married to the bedside, thousands of miles away, of another man to whom she was also not married.  Such simplicity of mental processes surpassed any complexity Jean Lambert could possibly conceive.

“Alan wouldn’t let me,” repeated the astounding Tony.  “I suppose it is better so.  By to-morrow I will probably agree with him.  When the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw too.  But the wind isn’t southerly to-night.  It wasn’t when I was dancing nor afterward,” she added with a flaming color in her cheeks remembering that moment in the Hostelry hall when wisdom had mattered very little to her in comparison with love.  “Oh, Jean, what if something dreadful should happen to him down there!  I can’t let him go.  I can’t.  But Dick mustn’t die alone either.  Oh, what shall I do?  What shall I do?”

And suddenly Tony threw herself face down on the bed sobbing great, heart rending sobs, but whether she was crying for Dick or Alan or herself or all three Jean was unable to decipher.  Perhaps Tony did not know herself.