“Tony!  Then you know?”

“About Alan’s ladies?  Oh, yes.  He told me himself.”

Dick looked blank.  What was a man to do in a case like this, finding his big bugaboo no bugaboo at all?

“I know a whole lot about Alan Massey, maybe more than is on your old card.  I know his mother was Lucia Vannini, so beautiful and so gifted that she danced in every court in Europe and was loved by a prince.  I know how Cyril Massey, an American artist, painted her portrait and loved her and married her.  I know how she worshiped him and was absolutely faithful to him to the day he died, when the very light of life went out for her.”

“She managed to live rather cheerfully afterward, even without light, if all the stories about her are true,” observed Dick, with, for him, unusual cynicism.

“You don’t understand.  She had to live.”

“There are other ways of living than those she chose.”

“Not for her.  She knew only two things—­love and dancing.  She was thrown from a horse the next year after her husband died.  Dancing was over for her.  There was only—­her beauty left.  Her husband’s people wouldn’t have anything to do with her because she had been a dancer and because of the prince.  Old John Massey, Cyril’s uncle, turned her and her baby from his door, and his cousin John and his wife refused even to see her.  She said she would make them hear of her before she died.  She did.”

“They heard all right.  She, and her son too, must have been a thorn in the flesh of the Masseys.  They were all rigid Puritans I understand, especially old John.”

“Serve him right,” sniffed Tony.  “They were rolling in wealth.  They might have helped her kept her from the other thing they condemned so.  She wanted money only for Alan, especially after he began to show that he had more than his father’s gifts.  She earned it in the only way she knew.  I don’t blame her.”

“Tony!”

“I can’t help it if I am shocking you, Dick.  I can understand why she did it.  She didn’t care anything about the lovers.  She never cared for anyone after Cyril died.  She gave herself for Alan.  Can’t you see that there was something rather fine about it?  I can.”

Dick grunted.  He remembered hearing something about a woman whose sins were forgiven her because she loved much.  But he couldn’t reconcile himself to hearing such stories from Tony Holiday’s lips.  They were remote from the clean, sweet, wholesome atmosphere in which she belonged.

“Anyway, Alan was a wonderful success.  He studied in Paris and he had pictures on exhibition in salons over there before he was twenty.  He was feted and courted and flattered and—­loved, until he thought the world was his and everything in it—­including the ladies.”  Tony made a little face at this.  She did not care very-much for that part of Alan’s story, herself.  “His mother was afraid he was going to have his head completely turned and would lose