nkfully her uncle's assurance that there was nothing at all to
worry about and that Ted was no doubt very much better off where he
was than if he had stayed in college.

As for the going to war part small blame had she for Ted in that. She
knew well it was precisely what she would have done herself in his case
and teemed with pride in her bonny, reckless, beloved soldier brother.

She had small time to think much about anybody's affairs beside her own
just now. Any day now might come the word that little Cecilia had gone
and that Tony Holiday would take her place on the Broadway stage as a
real star if only for a brief space of twinkling.

She saw very little even of Alan. He was tremendously busy and seemed,
oddly enough, to be drawing a little away from her, to be less jealously
exacting of her time and attention. It was not that he cared less, rather
more, Tony thought. His strange, tragic eyes rested hungrily upon her
whenever they were together and it seemed as if he would drink deep of
her youth and loveliness and joy, a draught deep enough to last a long,
long time, through days of parching thirst to follow. He was very gentle,
very quiet, very loveable, very tender. His stormy mood seemed to have
passed over leaving a great weariness in its wake.

A very passion of creation was upon him. Seeing the canvases that
flowered into beauty beneath his hand Tony felt very small and humble,
knew that by comparison with her lover's genius her own facile gifts were
but as a firefly's glow to the light of a flaming torch. He was of the
masters. She saw that and was proud and glad and awed by the fact. But
she saw also that the artist was consuming himself by the very fire of
his own genius and the knowledge troubled her though she saw no way to
check or prevent the holocaust if such it was.

Sometimes she was afraid. She knew that she would never be happy in the
every day way with Alan. Happiness did not grow in his sunless garden.
Married to him she would enter dark forests which were not her natural
environment. But it did not matter. She loved him. She came always back
to that. She was his, would always be his no matter what happened. She
was bound by the past, caught in its meshes forever.

And then suddenly a new turn of the wheel took place. Word came just
before Christmas that Dick Carson was very ill, dying perhaps down in
Mexico, stricken with a malarial fever.

A few moments after Tony received this stunning