e her nervous. But Dick was different. It was almost like having
Uncle Phil himself there. She wouldn't fail now. She couldn't. It was for
the honor of the Hill.

A moment later, still clutching Dick's comforting card, she ran in on the
stage, swinging her sun-bonnet from its green ribbons with hoydenish
grace, chanting a gay little lilt of an Irish melody. Her fear had gone
even as the dew might have disappeared at the kiss of the sun upon the
Killarney greensward.

Almost at once she discovered Dick and sang a part of her song straight
down at him. A little later she dared to let her eyes stray to the box
where Carol Clay sat. The actress smiled and Tony smiled back and then
forgot she was Tony, was henceforth only Rose of Killarney.

It was a winsome, old-timey sort of play, with an almost Barriesque
charm and whimsicality to it. The witching little Rose laughed and danced
and sang and flirted and wept and loved her way through it and in the end
threw herself in the right lover's arms, presumably there to dwell happy
forever after.

After the last curtain went down and she had smiled and bowed and kissed
her hand to the kindly audience over and over Tony fled to the dressing
room where she could still hear the intoxicating, delightful thunder of
applause. It had come. She could act. She could. Oh! She couldn't live
and be any happier.

But, after all she could stand a little more joy without coming to an
untimely end, for there suddenly smiling at her from the threshold was
Carol Clay congratulating her and telling her what a pleasure to-night's
Rose had been to the Rose of yesterday. And before Tony could get her
breath to do more than utter a rather shy and gasping word of gratitude,
the actress had invited her to take tea with her on the next day and she
had accepted and Carol Clay was gone.

It was in a wonderful world of dreams that Tony Holiday dwelt as she
removed a little of her makeup, gave orders to have all her flowers sent
to a near-by hospital, except Alan's, which she gathered up in her arms
and drawing her velvet cloak around her, stepped out into the
waiting-room.

But it was a world of rather alarming realities that she went into. There
was Dick Carson waiting as she had bidden him to wait in the message she
had sent him. And there was Alan Massey, unbidden and unexpected. And
both these males with whom she had flirted unconscionably for weeks past
were ominously belligerent of manner and cou