She wrote this decision to her uncle and asked to be relieved from her promise.

“I am sorry,” she wrote, “if you cannot approve but I cannot help it.  I love him and I am going to be engaged to him as soon as he comes back to New York if he wants it.  I am afraid I would have married him and gone to Mexico with him, given up the play and broken my promise to you, if he would have let me.  It goes that far and deep with me.

“People are crazy over his pictures.  The exhibition came off last week and they say he is one of the greatest living painters with a wonderful future ahead of him.  I am so proud and happy.  He is fine everyway now, has really sloughed off the past just as he promised he would.  So please, dear Uncle Phil, forgive me if I do what you don’t want me to.  I have to marry him.  In my heart I am married to him already.”

And this was the letter Philip Holiday found at his place at breakfast on the morning of the day Geoffrey Annersley was expected.  He read it gravely.  Rash, loving, generous-hearted Tony.  Where was she going?  Ah well, she was no longer a child to be protected from the storm and stress of life.  She was a woman grown, woman enough to love and to be loved greatly, to sacrifice and suffer if need be for love’s mighty sake.  She must go her way as Ted had gone his, as their father had gone his before them.  He could only pray that she was right in her faith that for love of her Alan Massey had been born anew.

His own deep affection for Ned’s children seemed at the moment a sadly powerless thing.  He had coveted the best things of life for them, happy, normal ways of peace and gentle living.  Yet here was Ted at twenty already lived through an experience, tragic enough to leave its scarlet mark for all the rest of his life and even now on the verge of voluntarily entering a terrific conflict from which few returned alive and none came back unchanged.  Here was Tony taking upon herself the thraldom of a love, which try as he would Philip Holiday could not see in any other light but as at best a cataclysmic risk.  And at this very hour Larry might be learning that the desire of his heart was dust and ashes, his hope a vain thing, himself an exile henceforth from the things that round out a man’s life, make it full and rich and satisfying.

And yet thinking of the three Philip Holiday found one clear ray of comfort.  With all their vagaries, their rash impulsions, their willful blindness, their recklessness, they had each run splendidly true to type.  Not one of the three had failed in the things that really count.  He had faith that none of them ever would.  They might blunder egregiously, suffer immeasurably, pay extravagantly, but they would each keep that vital spirit which they had in common, untarnished and undaunted, an unconquerable thing.

CHAPTER XXXV

GEOFFREY ANNERSLEY ARRIVES