And so, her very first night at Crest House, Antoinette Holiday discovered that, there was such a thing as love after all, and that it had to be reckoned with whether you desired or not to welcome it at your door.

CHAPTER XI

THINGS THAT WERE NOT ALL ON THE CARD

After that first night in the garden Alan Massey did not try to make open love to Tony again, but his eyes, following her wherever she moved, made no secret of his adoration.  He was nearly always by her side, driving off other devotees when he chose with a cool high-handedness which sometimes amused, sometimes infuriated Tony.  She found the man a baffling and fascinating combination of qualities, all petty selfishness and colossal egotisms one minute, abounding in endless charms and graces and small endearing chivalries the next; outrageously outspoken at times, at other times, reticent to the point of secretiveness; now reaching the most extravagant pitch of high spirits, and then, almost without warning, submerged in moods of Stygian gloom from which nothing could rouse him.

Tony came to know something of his romantic and rather mottled career from Carlotta and others, even from Alan himself.  She knew perfectly well he was not the kind of man Larry or her uncle would approve or tolerate.  She disapproved of him rather heartily herself in many ways.  At times she disliked him passionately, made up her mind she would have no more to do with him.  At other times she was all but in love with him, and suspected she would have found the world an intolerably dull place with Alan Massey suddenly removed from it.  When they danced together she was dangerously near being what he had claimed she was or would be—­all his.  She knew this, was afraid of it, yet she kept on dancing with him night after night.  It seemed as if she had to, as if she would have danced with him even if she knew the next moment would send them both hurtling through space, like Lucifer, down to damnation.

It was not until Dick Carson came down for a week end, some time later, that Tony discovered the resemblance in Alan to some one she knew of which Carlotta had spoken.  Incredibly and inexplicably Dick and Alan possessed a shadowy sort of similarity.  In most respects they were as different in appearance as they were in personality.  Dick’s hair was brown and straight; Alan’s, black and wavy.  Dick’s eyes were steady gray-blue; Alan’s, shifty gray-green.  Yet the resemblance was there, elusive, though it was.  Perhaps it lay in the curve of the sensitive nostrils, perhaps in the firm contour of chin, perhaps in the arch of the brow.  Perhaps it was nothing so tangible, just a fleeting trick of expression.  Tony did not know, but she caught the thing just as Carlotta had and it puzzled and interested her.

She spoke of it to Alan the next morning after Dick’s arrival, as they idled together, stretched out on the sand, waiting for the others to come out of the surf.