"Naturally. So did I. Who wouldn't think him the last person in the world to do a thing like that? But he is going and it is his idea not mine. I wanted to go too but he wouldn't let me," she added.
Jean gasped.
"Tony! You would have married him when your uncle—when everybody doesn't want you to?"
To Jean Lambert's well ordered, carefully fenced in mind such wild mental leaps as Tony Holiday's were almost too much to contemplate. But worse was to come.
"Married him! Oh, I don't know. I didn't think about that. I would just have gone with him. There wouldn't have been time to get a license. Of course I couldn't though on account of the play."
Jean gasped again. If it hadn't been for the play this astounding young person before her would have gone gallivanting off with one man to whom she was not married to the bedside, thousands of miles away, of another man to whom she was also not married. Such simplicity of mental processes surpassed any complexity Jean Lambert could possibly conceive.
"Alan wouldn't let me," repeated the astounding Tony. "I suppose it is better so. By to-morrow I will probably agree with him. When the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw too. But the wind isn't southerly to-night. It wasn't when I was dancing nor afterward," she added with a flaming color in her cheeks remembering that moment in the Hostelry hall when wisdom had mattered very little to her in comparison with love. "Oh, Jean, what if something dreadful should happen to him down there! I can't let him go. I can't. But Dick mustn't die alone either. Oh, what shall I do? What shall I do?"
And suddenly Tony threw herself face down on the bed sobbing great, heart rending sobs, but whether she was crying for Dick or Alan or herself or all three Jean was unable to decipher. Perhaps Tony did not know herself.
The next morning when Tony awoke Alan had already left for his long journey, but a great box full of roses told her she had been his last thought. One by one she lifted them out of the box—great, gorgeous, blood red beauties, royal, Tony thought, like the royal lover who had sent them. The only message with the flowers was a bit of verse, a poem of Tagore's whom Alan loved and had taught Tony to love too.
You are the evening cloud floating in the sky of
my dreams.
I paint you and fashion you with my love longings.
You are my own, my own, Dweller in my endless
dreams!