“We’ve nothing comparable to offer you, Miss Tony.  With Hempel and Miss Clay both behind you you are practically made.  You are a lucky little lady.  I know a dozen experienced actresses in this city who would give their best cigarette cases to be in your shoes.”

Arrived home at the Hostelry, armed with this approval, Tony found her Uncle’s answering wire bidding her do as she thought best and sending heartiest love and congratulations.  Dear Uncle Phil!

And then she sat down and signed the impressive document that made her Carol Clay’s understudy and a real wage-earning person.

All the afternoon she spent in long, delicious, dreamless slumber.  At five she was wakened by the maid bringing a letter from Alan, a wonderful, extravagant lover-note such as only he could pen.  Later she bathed and dressed, donning the white and silver gown she had worn the night when she had first admitted to Alan in Carlotta’s garden that she loved him, first took his kisses.  It was rather a sacred little gown to Tony, sacred to Alan and her own surrender to love.  He called it her starlight dress and loved it especially because it brought out the springlike, virginal quality of her youth and loveliness as her other more sophisticated gowns did not.  Tony wore it for Alan to-night, wanted him to think her lovely, to love her immensely.  She wanted to taste all life’s joy at once, have a perfect deluge of happiness.  Youth must be served.

Alan, graceful for being forgiven so easily, fell in with her mood and was at his best, courtly, considerate, adoring.  He exerted all the magic of his not inconsiderable charm to make Tony forget that other unfortunate night when he had appeared in other, less attractive colors.  And Tony was ready enough to forget beneath his worshiping green eyes and under the spell of his wonderful voice.  She meant to shut out the unwelcome guests of fear and doubt from her heart, let love alone have sway.

They dined at a gorgeous restaurant in a great hotel.  Tony reveled in the splendor and richness of the setting, delighted in the flawless service, the perfection of the strange and delectable viands which Alan ordered for their consumption.  Particularly she delighted in Alan himself and the way he fitted into the richness and luxury.  It was his rightful setting.  She could not imagine him in any of the shabby restaurants where she and Dick had often dined so contentedly.  Alan was a born aristocrat, patrician of the patricians.  His looks, his manner, everything about him betrayed it.  Most of all it was revealed in the way the waiters scurried to do his bidding, bowed obsequiously before him, recognized him as the authentic master, lord of the purple.

“So Carson really has gone to Mexico,” Alan murmured as they dallied over their salads, looking mostly into each other’s eyes.

“Yes, he went yesterday.  I hated to have him go.  It is awfully disagreeable and dangerous down there they say.  He might get a fever or get killed or something.”  Tony absent-mindedly nibbling a piece of roll already saw Dick in her mind’s eye the victim of an assassin’s blade.