"There is nothing to tell yet."

"And I suppose this is the end of poor d.i.c.k."

"Don't be silly, Carlotta. d.i.c.k never said a word of love to me in his life."

"That doesn't mean he doesn't think 'em. You have convenient eyes, Tony darling. You see only what you wish to see."

"I didn't want to see Alan's love. I tried dreadfully hard not to. But it set up a fire in my own house and blazed and smoked until I had to do something about it. See here, Carlotta. I'd like to ask you a question or two. You are not really going to marry Herbert Lathrop, are you?"

A queer little shadow, almost like a veil, pa.s.sed over Carlotta's face at this counter charge.

"Why not?" she parried.

"You know why not. He is exactly what Hal Underwood calls him, a poor fish. He is as close to being a nonent.i.ty as anything I ever saw."

"Precisely why I selected him," drawled Carlotta. "I've got to marry somebody and poor Herbert hasn't a vice except his excess of virtue. We can't have another old maid in the family. Aunt Lottie is a shining example of what to avoid. I am not going to be 'Lottie the second' I have decided on that."

"As if you could," protested Tony indignantly.

"Oh, I could. You look at Aunt Lottie's pictures of fifteen years ago.

She was just as pretty as I am. She had loads of lovers but somehow they all slipped through her fingers. She has been s.e.x-starved. She ought to have married and had children. I don't want to be a hungry spinster. They are infernally miserable."

"Carlotta!" Tony was a little shocked at her friend's bluntness, a little puzzled as to what lay behind her arguments. "You don't have to be a hungry spinster. There are other men besides Herbert that want to marry you."

"Certainly. Some of them want to marry my money. Some of them want to marry my body. I grant you Herbert is a poor fish in some ways, but at least he wants to marry me, myself, which is more than the others do."

"That isn't true. Hal Underwood wants to marry you, yourself."

"Oh, Hal!" conceded Carlotta. "I forgot him for a moment. You are right.

He is real--too real. I should hurt him marrying him and not caring enough. That is why a nonent.i.ty is preferable. It doesn't know what it is missing. Hal would know."

"But there is no reason why you shouldn't wait until you find somebody you could care for," persisted Tony.

"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 Ma.s.sey 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 Ma.s.sey. 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, d.i.c.k Carson the nameless, who was really John Ma.s.sey 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 Sat.u.r.day, 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 s.p.a.ce, 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.

Larry was more baffling. He was always quiet. He was quieter than ever to-day. There was something in his gray eyes which spelled trouble, Tony thought. What was it? Was he worried about a case? Was Granny worse? Was Ted in some sc.r.a.pe? Something there certainly was on his mind. Tony was sure of that, though she could not conjecture what.

The Holidays had an almost uncanny way of understanding things about each other, things which sometimes never rose to the surface at all. Perhaps it was that they were so close together in sympathy that a kind of small telepathic signal registered automatically when anything was wrong with any of them. So far as her brothers were concerned Tony's intuition was all but infallible.

She found the family gift a shade disconcerting, a little later, when after her uncle kissed her he held her off at arm's length and studied her face. Tony's eyes fell beneath his questioning gaze. For almost the first time in her life she had a secret to keep from him if she could.

"What have they been doing to my little girl?" he asked. "They have taken away her sunshininess."

"Oh, no, they haven't," denied Tony quickly. "It is just that I am tired.

We have been on the go all the time and kept scandalously late hours.

I'll be all right as soon as I have caught up. I feel as if I could sleep for a century and any prince who has the effrontery to wake me up will fare badly."

She laughed, but even in her own ears the laughter did not sound quite natural and she was sure Uncle Phil thought the same, though he asked no more questions.

"It is like living in a palace being at Crest House," she went on. "I've played princess to my heart's content--been waited on and feted and flirted with until I'm tired to death of it all and want to be just plain Tony again."

She slid into her uncle's arms with a weary little sigh. It was good--oh so good--to have him again! She hadn't known she had missed him so until she felt the comfort of his presence. In his arms Alan Ma.s.sey and all he stood for seemed very far away.

"Got letters for you this morning," announced Ted. "I forgot to give them to you." He fished the aforesaid letters out of his pocket and examined them before handing them over. "One is from d.i.c.k--the other"--he held the large square envelope off and squinted at it teasingly. "Some scrawl!"

he commented. "Reckless display of ink and flourishes, I call it. Who's the party?"

Tony s.n.a.t.c.hed the letters, her face rosy.

"Give me d.i.c.k's. I haven't heard from him but once since he went back to New York and that was just a card. Oh-h! Listen everybody. The Universal has accepted his story and wants him to do a whole series of them. Oh, isn't that just wonderful?"

Tony's old sparkles were back now. There were no reservations necessary here. Everybody knew and loved d.i.c.k and would be glad as she was herself in his success.

"Hail to d.i.c.ky Dumas!" she added, gaily waving the letter aloft. "I always knew he would get there. And that was the very story he read me.

Wasn't it lucky I liked it really? If I hadn't, and it had turned out to be good, wouldn't it have been awful?"

Everybody laughed at that and perhaps n.o.body but the doctor noticed that the other letter in the unfamiliar handwriting was tucked away very quickly out of sight in her bag and no comments made.

It was not until Tony had gone the rounds of the household and greeted everyone from Granny down to Max that she read Alan's letter, as she sat curled up in the cretonned window seat, just as the little girl Tony had been wont to sit and devour love stories. This was a love story, too--her own and with a sadly complicated plot at that.

It was the first letter she had had from Alan and she found it very wonderful and exciting reading. It was br.i.m.m.i.n.g over, as might have been expected, with pa.s.sionate lover's protests and extravagant endearments which Tony could not have imagined her Anglo-Saxon relatives or friends even conceiving, let alone putting on paper. But Alan was different.

These things were no affectation with him, but natural as breathing, part and parcel of his personality. She could hear him now say "_carissima_"

in that low, deep-cadenced, musical voice of his and the word seemed very sweet and beautiful to her as it sang in her heart and she read it in the dashing script upon the paper.

He was desolated without her, he wrote. Nothing was worth while. Nothing interested him. He was refusing all invitations, went nowhere. He just sat alone in the studio and dreamed about her or made sketches of her from memory. She was everywhere, all about him. She filled the studio with her voice, her laughter, her wonderful eyes. But oh, he was so lonely, so unutterably lonely without her. Must he really wait a whole year before he made her his? A year was twelve long, long months.

Anything could happen in a year. One of them might die and the other would go frustrate and lonely forever, like a sad wind in the night.

Tony caught her breath quickly at that sentence. The poetry of it captivated her fancy, the dread of what it conjured clutched like cold hands at her heart. She wanted Alan now, wanted love now. Already those dear folks downstairs were beginning to seem like ghosts, she and Alan the only real people. What if he should die, what if something should happen to keep them forever apart, how could she bear it? How could she?