And it didn’t take many minutes for me to slip into old summer-before-last—­also for the last time inside of those buttons—­and run through the garden, my heart singing, “Billy, Billy,” in a perfect rapture of tune.  I ran past the surgery door and found him in his cot almost asleep, and we had a bear reunion in the wicker chair by the window that made us both breathless.

“What did you bring me, Molly?” he finally kissed under my right ear.

“A real cricket-ball and bat, lover, and an engine with five carriages, a rake and a spade and a hoe, two guns that pop a new way, and something that squirts water, and some other things.  Will that be enough?” I hugged him up anxiously, for sometimes he is hard to please, and I might not have got the very thing he wanted.

“Thank you, Molly, all them things is what I want, but you oughter have bringed more’n that for three days not being here with me.”

Did any woman ever have a more lovely lover than that?  I don’t know how long I should have rocked him in the twilight if Dr. John’s voice hadn’t come across the hall in command.

“Put him down now, Mrs. Molly, and come and say other how-do-you-does,” he called softly.

It was a funny glad-to-see-him I felt as I came into the surgery where he was standing over by the window looking out at my garden in its twilight glow.  I gave him my hand and a good deal more of a smile and a blush than I intended.

He very far from kissed the hand; he held it just long enough to turn me round into the light and give me one long looking-over from head to feet.

“Just where does that corset press you worst?” he asked in the tone of voice he uses to say “put out your tongue.”  So much of my bad temper rose to my face that it is a wonder it didn’t make a scar; but I was cold enough to all outward appearances.

“I am making a call on a friend, Dr. Moore, and not a consultation visit to my physician,” I said, looking into his face as though I had never seen him before.

“I beg your pardon, Molly,” he exclaimed, and his face was redder than mine, and then it went white with mortification.  I couldn’t stand that.

“Don’t do that!” I exclaimed, and before I knew it I had taken hold of his hand, and had it in both of mine.  “I know I look as if I was shrunk or laced, but I’m not!  I was going to tell you all about it.  I’m really inches bigger in the right place, and just—­just ‘controlled,’ the woman called it, in the wrong place.”

The blood came back into his face, and he laughed as he gave me a little shake that pushed me away from him.  “Don’t you ever scare me like that again, child, or it might be serious,” he said in the Billy-and-me tone of voice that I like a little, only—­

“I never will,” I said in a hurry; “I want you to ask me anything in the world you want to, and I’ll always do it.”

“Well, let me take you home through the garden then—­and, yes, I believe I’ll stay to supper with Mrs. Henderson.  Don’t you want to tell me what a little girl like you did in a big city, and—­and read me part of that Paris letter I saw the postman give Jane this afternoon?”