“I do, Alan.  I have always believed it, I think, ever since that first night, though I have tried not to.  I am very sorry though.  Love—­your kind of love is a fearful thing.  I am afraid of it.”

“It is fearful, but beautiful too—­very beautiful—­like fire.  Did you ever think what a strange dual element fire is?  It consumes—­is a force of destruction.  But it also purifies, burns out dross.  Love is like that, my Tony.  Mine for you may damn me forever, or it may take me to the very gate of Heaven.  I don’t know myself which it will be.”

As he spoke there was a strange kind of illumination on his face, a look almost of spiritual exaltation.  It awed Tony, bereft her of words.  This was a new Alan Massey—­an Alan Massey she had never seen before, and she found herself looking up instead of down at him.

He stooped and kissed her hand reverently, as a devotee might pay homage at the shrine of a saint.

“I shall not see you again until to-night, Tony.  I am going into town.  But I shall be back—­for one more dance with you, heart’s dearest.  And then I promise I will go away and leave you tomorrow.  You will dance with me, Tony—­once?  We shall have that one perfect thing to remember?”

Tony bowed assent.  And in a moment she was alone with her roses.

That afternoon she shut herself in her room to write letters to the home people whom she had neglected badly of late.  Every moment had been so full since she had come to Carlotta’s.  There had been so little time to write and when she had written it had given little of what she was really living and feeling—­just the mere externals and not all of them, as she was very well aware.  They would never understand her relation with Alan.  They would disapprove, just as Dick had disapproved.  Perhaps she did not understand, herself, why she had let herself get so deeply entangled in something which could not go on, something, which was the profoundest folly, if nothing worse.

The morning had crystallized her fear of the growing complication of the situation.  She was glad Alan was going away, glad she had had the strength of will to deny him his will, glad that she could now—­after to-night—­come back into undisputed possession of the kingdom of herself.  But in her heart she was gladder that there was to-night and that one last dance with Alan Massey before life became simple and sane and tame again, and Alan and his wild love passed out of it forever.

She finished her letters, which were not very satisfactory after all.  How could one write real letters when one’s pen was writing one thing and one’s thoughts were darting hither and thither about very different business?  She threw herself in the chaise longue, not yet ready to dress and go down to join the others.  There was nobody there she cared to talk to, somehow.  Alan was not there.  Nobody else mattered.  It had come to that.

Idly she picked up a volume of verse that lay beside her on the table and fluttered its pages, seeking something to meet her restless mood.  Presently in her vagrant seeking she chanced upon a little poem—­a poem she read and reread, twice, three times.