“Dick, do you believe that the real Alan is dust—­nothing but dust down in a grave?” demanded Tony suddenly.

“No, Tony, I don’t.  I can’t.  The essence of what was best in him is alive somewhere.  I know it.  It must be.  His love for you—­for all beauty—­they couldn’t die, dear.  They were big enough to be immortal.”

“And his dancing,” sighed Tony.  “His dancing couldn’t die.  It had a soul.”

If she had not been sure already that Alan had meant to go out of her life even if he had not meant to go to his death when he left New York she would have been convinced a little later.  Alan’s Japanese servant brought two gifts to her from his honorable master according to his honorable master’s orders should he not return from his journey.  His honorable master being unfortunately dead his unworthy servant laid the gifts at Mees Holiday’s honorable feet.  Whereupon the bearer had departed as quietly as death itself might come.

One of the gifts was a picture, a painting which Tony had seen, and which was she thought the most beautiful of all his beautiful creations.  Its sheer loveliness would have hurt her even if it had had no other significance and it did have a very real message.

At first sight the whole scene seemed enveloped in translucent, silver mist.  As one looked more closely however there was revealed the figure of a man, black clad in pilgrim guise, kneeling on the verge of a precipitous cliff which rose out of a seemingly bottomless abyss of terrific blackness.  Though in posture of prayer the pilgrim’s head was lifted and his face wore an expression of rapt adoration.  Above a film of fog in the heavens stretched a clear space of deep blue black sky in which hung a single luminous star.  From the star a line of golden light of unearthly radiance descended and finding its way to the uplifted transfigured face of the kneeling pilgrim ended there.

Tony Holiday understood, got the message as clearly as if Alan himself stood beside her to interpret it.  She knew that he was telling her through the picture that she had saved his soul, kept him out of the abyss, that to the end she was what he had so often called her—­his star.

With tear blinded eyes she turned from the canvas to the little silver box which the servant had placed in her hands together with a sealed envelope.  In the box was a gorgeous, unset ruby, the gem of Alan’s collection as Tony well knew having worshiped often at its shrine.  It lay there now against the austere purity of its white satin background—­the symbol of imperishable passion.

Reverently Tony closed the little box and opened the sealed envelope dreading yet longing to know its contents.  Alan had sent her no word of farewell, had not written to her that night before he went out into the storm to meet his death, had made no response to the letter she herself had written offering herself and her love and faith for his taking.  At first these things had hurt her.  But these gifts of his were beginning to make her understand his silence.  Selfish and spectacular all his life at his death Alan Massey had been surpassingly generous and simple.  He had chosen to bequeath his love to her not as an obsession and a bondage but as an elemental thing like light and air.