That’s just what I mean—­love boiled down and sugared over is apt to get an explosive flavour, and one had better be careful with that kind if one is timid; which I’m not.  As I said, also, I am ready for a little more of life, so I read on without fear.  And, to be fair, Alfred had well boiled his own last paragraph.  It snapped; and I jumped and gasped.  I almost thought I didn’t quite like it, and was going to read it over again to see, when I saw a procession coming over from Dr. John’s, and I laid the bombshell down on the bench.

First came the red setter that is always first with Dr. John, and then he came himself, leading Billy by the hand.  It was Billy, but the most subdued Billy I ever saw, and I held out my arms and started for him.

“Wait a minute, please, Molly,” said the doctor in a voice he always uses when he’s punishing Billy and me.  “Bill came to apologise to you for being rude to your—­your guest.  He told me all about it, and I think he’s sorry.  Tell Mrs. Carter you are sorry, son.”  When that man speaks to me as if I were just any old body else, I hate him so it is a wonder I don’t show it more than I do.  But there was nothing to say, and I looked at Billy, and Billy looked at me.

Then suddenly he stretched out his little arms to me, and the dimples winked at me from all over his darling face.

“Molly, Molly,” he said, with a perfect rapture of chuckles in his voice, “now you look just as pretty as you do when you go to bed—­all whity all over.  You can kiss my kiss-spot a hundred times while I bear-hug you for that nice not-black dress,” and before any stern person could have stopped us I was on my knees on the grass kissing my fill from the “kiss-spot” on the back of his neck, while he hugged all the starch out of the old white dress.

And Dr. John sat down on the bench quick, and laughed out loud one of the very few times I ever heard him do it.  He was looking down at us, but I didn’t laugh up into his eyes.  I was afraid.  I felt it was safer to go on kissing the kiss-spot for the present.

“Bill,” he said, with his voice dancing, “that’s the most effective apology I ever heard.  You were sorry to some point.”

Then suddenly Billy stiffened right in my arms, and looked me straight in the face, and said in the doctor’s own brisk tones, even with his Cupid mouth set in the same straight line—­

“I say I’m sorry, Molly, but bother that man, and I’ll hit him yet!”

What could we say?  What could we do?  We didn’t try.  I busied myself in tying the string on Billy’s blouse that had come untied in the bear-hug, and the doctor suddenly discovered the letter on the bench.  I saw him see it without looking in his direction at all.

“And how many pounds are we nearer the scarlet-runner state of existence, Mrs. Molly?” he asked me before I had finished tying the blouse, in the nicest voice in the world, fairly cracking with friendship and good humour and hateful things like that.  Why I should have wanted him to get huffy over that letter is more than I can say.  But I did; and he didn’t.