k and would be glad as she was herself
in his success.

"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