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“No, I don’t really believe you were. You had never had any pleasure, Little Boy. The world owed you some. I am glad it was good.”

“It was. And—Alison, there was one special thing I never wrote to you.”

He stopped.

“Go on, Tony dear. It doesn’t sound like a sin, somehow?”

“It’s not—only I feel shy. . . . I was awfully excited when I heard it, though it hasn’t any real importance—and I knew you’d be interested, only after the first night the glow had gone, and I couldn’t write about it, somehow. I only told one person in the first blush of hearing, and then I was rather sorry, because no good can come of its being known, and yet—Well—I found out who my mother’s people were.”

"Tony! And you say it won’t make any difference!”

“No, it won’t, because—listen, Alison! it’s quite as penny-novelettish as you imagined; there is a title (it’s only a barony—don’t be expecting a dukedom!) and—someone else has it. I can’t turn her out, can I?”

“Do you mean that you’re actually—Oh! I must tell Winthrop. He always laughed so———”

“No, I’m not ‘actually.’ It belongs to a girl. Now, Alison, can you see me as an English peer?”

“Well, no, dear; but perhaps you’d make a very nice one, and you haven’t told me the name yet.”

“Trent. Not flowery at all. I heard by accident, and I remembered at once just how it used to go, once the other things pieced in. Trent, Baron Trent. It’s rather funny, isn’t it?—and quite futile.”

“Ye—es, but I don’t just like your turning your back on it. They might be so glad to see you———”

Tony laughed rather hardly.

“They showed mother how glad they were of her and