“Hail to Dicky Dumas!” she added, gaily waving the letter aloft.  “I always knew he would get there.  And that was the very story he read me.  Wasn’t it lucky I liked it really?  If I hadn’t, and it had turned out to be good, wouldn’t it have been awful?”

Everybody laughed at that and perhaps nobody but the doctor noticed that the other letter in the unfamiliar handwriting was tucked away very quickly out of sight in her bag and no comments made.

It was not until Tony had gone the rounds of the household and greeted everyone from Granny down to Max that she read Alan’s letter, as she sat curled up in the cretonned window seat, just as the little girl Tony had been wont to sit and devour love stories.  This was a love story, too—­her own and with a sadly complicated plot at that.

It was the first letter she had had from Alan and she found it very wonderful and exciting reading.  It was brimming over, as might have been expected, with passionate lover’s protests and extravagant endearments which Tony could not have imagined her Anglo-Saxon relatives or friends even conceiving, let alone putting on paper.  But Alan was different.  These things were no affectation with him, but natural as breathing, part and parcel of his personality.  She could hear him now say “carissima” in that low, deep-cadenced, musical voice of his and the word seemed very sweet and beautiful to her as it sang in her heart and she read it in the dashing script upon the paper.

He was desolated without her, he wrote.  Nothing was worth while.  Nothing interested him.  He was refusing all invitations, went nowhere.  He just sat alone in the studio and dreamed about her or made sketches of her from memory.  She was everywhere, all about him.  She filled the studio with her voice, her laughter, her wonderful eyes.  But oh, he was so lonely, so unutterably lonely without her.  Must he really wait a whole year before he made her his?  A year was twelve long, long months.  Anything could happen in a year.  One of them might die and the other would go frustrate and lonely forever, like a sad wind in the night.

Tony caught her breath quickly at that sentence.  The poetry of it captivated her fancy, the dread of what it conjured clutched like cold hands at her heart.  She wanted Alan now, wanted love now.  Already those dear folks downstairs were beginning to seem like ghosts, she and Alan the only real people.  What if he should die, what if something should happen to keep them forever apart, how could she bear it?  How could she?

She turned back to her letter which had turned into an impassioned plea that she would never forsake him, no matter what happened, never drive him over the precipice like the Gadderene swine.

“You and your love are the only thing that can save me, dear heart,” he wrote.  “Remember that always.  Without you I shall go down, down into blacker pits than I ever sank before.  With you I shall come out into the light.  I swear it.  But oh, beloved, pray for me, if you know how to pray.  I don’t.  I never had a god.”