Slight as Max Hempel's hope may have been that
Laura LaRue's daughter was to prove the ingenue he sought, infinitely
slighter was Dick Carson's hope of ever making Tony his wife. How could
it be otherwise? Tony Holiday was as far above him in his own eyes as the
top of Mount Tom was high above the onion beds of the valley. The very
name he used was his only because she had given it to him. Dick Nobody he
had been. Richard Carson he had become through grace of Tony.

Like his companion the young man went back into the past, though not so
far a journey. As vividly as if it were but yesterday he remembered the
misery of flesh and spirit which had been his as he stowed himself away
in the hay loft in the Holiday's barn, that long ago summer dawn, too
sick to take another step and caring little whether he lived or died,
conscious vaguely, however, that death would be infinitely preferable to
going back to the life of the circus and the man Jim's coarse brutality
from which he had made his escape at last.

And then he had opened his eyes, hours later, and there had been
Tony--and there had been chiefly Tony ever since, for him.

If ever he amounted to anything, and he meant to amount to something, it
would be all due to Tony and her Uncle Phil. The two of them had saved
him in more ways than one, had faith in him when he wasn't much but a
scarecrow, ignorant, profane, unmoral, miserable, a "gutter brat" as some
one had once called him, a phrase he had never forgotten. It had seemed
to brand him, set him apart from people like the Holidays forever. But
Tony and Doctor Phil had shown him a different way of looking at it,
proved to him that nothing could really disgrace him but himself. They
had given him his chance and he had taken it. Please God he would make
himself yet into something they could be proud of, and it would all be
their doing. He would never forget that, whatever happened.

A half hour later the train puffed and wheezed into the station at
Northampton. Dick Carson and Max Hempel, still close together, descended
into the swarming, chattering crowd which was delightfully if confusingly
congested with pretty girls, more pretty girls and still more pretty
girls. But Dick was not confused. Even before the train had come to a
full stop he had caught sight of Tony. He had a single track mind so far
as girls were concerned. From the moment his eyes discovered Tony Holiday
the rest simply did not exist for him. It is