“He’s come!” I gasped.  “And I’m frightened to death, with nobody but you to run to.  Hide me quick!  He’s fat and I hate him!” I was that deadly cold you can get when fear runs into your very marrow and congeals the blood in your arteries.  “Quick, quick!” I panted.

He must have been as pale as I was, and for an eternity of a second he looked at me, then suddenly heaven shone from his eyes and he opened his arms to me with just one word.

“Here?”

I went.

He held me gently for a half-second, and then with a sob which I felt rather than heard, he crushed me to him and stopped my breath with his lips on mine.  I understood things then that I never had before, and I felt that wise guardian man-angel take his fingers from mine and leave me safe at last.  I raised my hand and pressed it against John’s wet lashes until he could let me speak and I was melted into his very breast itself.

“Molly,” he said when enough tenderness had come back into his arms to let me breathe, “you have almost killed me!”

“You!” I exclaimed, crowding still closer, or at least trying to.  “It’s not you; it’s I that am killed, and you did it!  I know you don’t really want me, but I can’t help that I’d rather you’d do the suffering with me than to do it myself away from you.  I’m so hungry and thirsty for you that—­that I can’t diet any longer!” I put the case the strongest way I knew how and got a swooning, maddening, luscious result.

“Want you, Molly?” he almost sobbed, and I felt his heart pounding hard next to my shoulder.

“Yes, want me!” I answered with more spirit than breath left in me.  “I refuse to believe you are as stupid as I am, and anybody with even an ordinary amount of brains must have seen how hard I was fighting for you.  I feel sure I left no stone unturned.  Some of them I can already think back and see myself tugging at, and it makes me hot all over.  I’m foolish, and always was, so I’m to be excused for acting that awful way, but you are to blame for letting me do it.  I’m going to be your punishment for life for not having been stern and stopped me.  You had better stop me some now anyway, for if I go on loving you as I have been for the last few minutes it will make you uncomfortable.”

“Peaches,” he said, after he had hushed me with another broken dose of love, as large as he thought I could stand—­I could have stood more!—­“I am never going to tell you how long I have loved you, but that day you came to me all in a flutter with Al Bennett’s letter in your hand it is going to take you a lifetime to settle for.  You were mine—­and Bill’s!  How could you—­but women don’t understand!” I felt him shudder in my arms as I held him close.  I was repaid for all those tiresome exercises I had taken by the strength to crush him against my breast almost as hard as he crushed me.  Our combined strength was terrific, dangerous to life and ribs, but—­heavenly!