And, with her brother on one side of her and her uncle on the other, Tony gave a hand to each and for a moment no one spoke.  Then Ted produced his telegrams one of which was addressed to Tony and one to her uncle.  Both announced the young doctor’s safety.  “Staying over in Pittsburgh.  Letter follows,” was in the doctor’s message.  “Sorry can’t make commencement.  Love and congratulations,” was in Tony’s.

“There, didn’t I tell you he was all right?” demanded Ted, as if his brother’s safety were due to his own remarkably good management of the affair.  “Gee!  Tony!  If you knew how I felt when Dick told me this morning.  I pretty nearly disgraced myself by toppling over, just like a girl, on the campus.  Lord!  It was fierce.”

“I know.”  Tony squeezed his hand sympathetically.  “And Dick—­why Dick must have kept me out in Paradise on purpose.”

“Sure he did.  Dick’s a jim dandy and don’t you forget it.”

“I shan’t,” said Tony, her eyes a little misty, remembering how Dick had fought all day to keep her care-free happiness intact.  “I don’t know whether to be angry at you all for keeping it from me or to fall on your necks and weep because you were all so dear not to tell me.  And oh!  If anything had happened to Larry!  I don’t see how I could have stood it.  It makes us all seem awfully near, doesn’t it?”

“You bet!” agreed Ted with more fervor than elegance.  “If the old chap had been done for I’d have felt like making for the river, myself.  Funny, now the scare is over and he is all safe, I shall probably cuss him out as hard as ever next time he tries to preach at me.”

“You had better listen to him instead.  Larry is apt to be right and you are apt to be wrong, and you know it.”

“Maybe it is because I do know it and because he is so devilish right that I damn him,” observed the youngest Holiday sagely, his eyes meeting his uncle’s over his sister’s head.

It wasn’t until he had danced and flirted and made merry for three consecutive hours at the hop, and proposed in the exuberance of his mood to at least three different charmers whose names he had forgotten by the next day, that Ted Holiday remembered Madeline and his promise to keep tryst with her that afternoon.  Other things of more moment had swept her clean from his mind.

“Thunder!” he muttered to himself.  “Wonder what she is thinking when I swore by all that was holy to come.  Oh well; I should worry.  I couldn’t help it.  I’ll write and explain how it happened.”

So said, so done.  He scribbled off a hasty note of explanation and apology which he signed “Yours devotedly, Ted Holiday” and went out to the corner mail box to dispatch the same so it would go out in the early morning collection, and prepared to dismiss the matter from his mind again.

Coming back into his room he found his uncle standing on the threshold.

“Had to get a letter off,” murmured the young man as his uncle looked inquiring.  He turned to light a cigarette with an air of determined casualness.  He didn’t care to have Uncle Phil know any more about the Madeline affair.