As for the going to war part small blame had she for Ted in that.  She knew well it was precisely what she would have done herself in his case and teemed with pride in her bonny, reckless, beloved soldier brother.

She had small time to think much about anybody’s affairs beside her own just now.  Any day now might come the word that little Cecilia had gone and that Tony Holiday would take her place on the Broadway stage as a real star if only for a brief space of twinkling.

She saw very little even of Alan.  He was tremendously busy and seemed, oddly enough, to be drawing a little away from her, to be less jealously exacting of her time and attention.  It was not that he cared less, rather more, Tony thought.  His strange, tragic eyes rested hungrily upon her whenever they were together and it seemed as if he would drink deep of her youth and loveliness and joy, a draught deep enough to last a long, long time, through days of parching thirst to follow.  He was very gentle, very quiet, very loveable, very tender.  His stormy mood seemed to have passed over leaving a great weariness in its wake.

A very passion of creation was upon him.  Seeing the canvases that flowered into beauty beneath his hand Tony felt very small and humble, knew that by comparison with her lover’s genius her own facile gifts were but as a firefly’s glow to the light of a flaming torch.  He was of the masters.  She saw that and was proud and glad and awed by the fact.  But she saw also that the artist was consuming himself by the very fire of his own genius and the knowledge troubled her though she saw no way to check or prevent the holocaust if such it was.

Sometimes she was afraid.  She knew that she would never be happy in the every day way with Alan.  Happiness did not grow in his sunless garden.  Married to him she would enter dark forests which were not her natural environment.  But it did not matter.  She loved him.  She came always back to that.  She was his, would always be his no matter what happened.  She was bound by the past, caught in its meshes forever.

And then suddenly a new turn of the wheel took place.  Word came just before Christmas that Dick Carson was very ill, dying perhaps down in Mexico, stricken with a malarial fever.

A few moments after Tony received this stunning news Alan Massey’s card was brought to her.  She went down to the reception room, gave him a limp cold little hand in greeting and asked if he minded going out with her.  She had to talk with him.  She couldn’t talk here.

Alan did not mind.  A little later they were walking riverward toward a brilliant orange sky, against which the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument loomed gray and majestic.  It was bitter cold.  A stinging wind lashed the girl’s skirts around her and bit into her cheeks.  But somehow she welcomed the physical discomfort.  It matched her mood.

Then the story came out.  Dick was sick, very sick, going to die maybe and she, Tony Holiday couldn’t stand it.