the western front that had failed miserably, for this was the year
nineteen hundred and sixteen and there was a war going on, "on the other
side." Oh, typically American phrase!

Meanwhile the young man, too, had stopped staring at Antoinette Holiday's
pictured face and was staring out of the window instead at the fast
flying landscape. He had really no need anyway to look at a picture of
Tony. His head and heart were full of them. He had been storing them up
for over eight years and it was a considerable collection by now and one
in which he took great joy in lonely hours in his dingy little lodging
room, or in odd moments as he went his way at his task as a reporter for
a great New York daily. The perspicuous reader will not need to be told
that the young man was in love with Tony Holiday--desperately in love.

Desperately was the word. Slight as Max Hempel's hope may have been that
Laura LaRue's daughter was to prove the ingénue 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.