“That is all you know about it, my dear.  There is the best reason in the world.  I found him—­and lost him.”

“Carlotta—­is it Phil?”

Carlotta sprang up and went over to the window.  She took the rose she had been wearing, in her hands and deliberately pulled it apart letting the petals drift one by one out into the night.  Then she turned back to Tony.

“Don’t ask questions, Tony.  I am not going to talk.”  But she lingered a moment beside her friend.  “You and I, Tony darling, don’t seem to have very much luck in love,” she murmured.  “I hope you will be happy with Alan, if you do marry him.  But happiness isn’t exactly necessary.  There are other things—­” She broke off and began again.  “There are other things in a man’s life besides love.  Somebody said that to me once and I believe it is true.  But there isn’t so much besides that matters much to a woman.  I wish there were.  I hate love.”  And pressing a rare kiss on her friend’s cheek Carlotta vanished for the night.

Meanwhile Alan Massey smoked and thought and cursed the past that had him in its hateful toils.  Like the guilty king in Hamlet, his soul, “struggling to be free” was “but the more engaged.”  He honestly desired to be worthy of Tony Holiday, to stand clear in her eyes, but he did not want it badly enough, to the “teeth and forehead of his faults to give in evidence.”  He did not want to bare the one worst plague spot of all and run the risk not only of losing Tony himself but perhaps also of clearing the way to her for his cousin, John Massey.  Small wonder he smoked gall and wormwood in his cigarettes that night.

And far away in the heat and grime and din of the great city, Dick Carson the nameless, who was really John Massey and heir to a great fortune, sat dreaming over a girl’s picture, telling himself that Tony must care a little to have gotten up in the silver gray of the morning to see him off so kindly.  Happily for the dreamer’s peace of mind he had no means of knowing that that very night, in the starlit garden by the sea, Tony Holiday had taken upon herself the mad and sad and glad bondage of love.

CHAPTER XV

ON THE EDGE OF THE PRECIPICE

Tony, getting off the train at Dunbury on Saturday, found her brothers waiting for her with the car, and the kiddies on the back seat, “for ballast” as Ted said.  With one quick apprizing glance the girl took in the two young men.

Ted was brown and healthy looking, clear-eyed, steady-nerved, for once, without the inevitable cigarette in his mouth.  He was oddly improved somehow, his sister thought, considering how short a time she had been away from the Hill.  She noticed also that he drove the car much less recklessly than was his wont, took no chances on curves, slid by no vehicles at hair-breadth space, speeded not at all, and though he kept up a running fire of merry nonsense, had his eye on the road as he drove.  So far so good.  That spill out on the Florence road wasn’t all loss, it seemed.