And so, as there is nobody else exactly suitable in town, it all simmers down to one or the other of these or Alfred.  In my heart I knew that I couldn’t hesitate a minute—­and in the flash of a second I decided.  Of course I love Alfred, and I’ll take him gladly and be the wife he has waited for all these six lonely years.  I’ll make everything up to him, if I have to diet to keep thin for him the rest of my life.  Probably I shall have that very thing to do, and I get weak at the idea.  Before I burn this book I’ll have to copy it all out and be chained to it for life.  At the thought my heart dropped like a sinker to my toes; but I hauled it up to its normal place with picturing to myself how Alfred would look when he saw me in that old blue muslin remade into a Rene wonder.  However, my old heart would show a strange propensity for sinking down into my slippers without any reason at all.  Tears were even coming into my eyes when Tom suddenly came over the fence and picked me and the heart up together and put us into an adventure of the first water.

“Molly,” he said in the most nonchalant manner imaginable, “we’ve got a jolly, strolling, German band up at the hotel; and we’re going to have an evening’s gaiety.  Get into a pretty dress, and don’t keep me waiting.”

“Tom!” I gasped.

“Oh, don’t spoil sport, Moll!  You said you would wake up this town, and now do it.  It seems twenty instead of six years since I went to a party with you, and I’m not going to wait any longer.  Everybody is there, and they can’t all have Miss Clinton.”

That settled it—­I couldn’t let a visiting girl be worn out with attention.  Of course, I had planned to make a dignified debut under my own roof, backed up by the presence of ancestral and marital rosewood, silver and mahogany, as a widow should; but duty called me to de-weed myself amidst the informality of an impromptu soiree at the little town hotel.  And in the fifteen minutes Tom gave me I de-weeded to some purpose and flowered out to still more.  I never do anything by halves.

In that—­that—­trousseau Madame Rene had made me there was one, what she called “simple” lingerie frock.  And it looked just as simple as the cheque it called for.  It was of lawn as transparent as a cobweb, real lace and tiny delicious incrustations of embroidery.  It fitted in lines that melted into curves, had enticements in the shape of a long sash and a dazzling breast-knot of shimmery blue, the colour of my eyes, and I looked new-born in it.

I’m glad that poor Mr. Carter was so stern with me about pads in my hair, now that they are out of fashion, for I’ve got lots of my own left in consequence of not wearing other people’s.  It clings and coils to my head just anyhow, so that it looks as if I had spent an hour on it.  That made me able to be ready to go down to Tom in only ten minutes over the time he gave me.

I stopped on next to the bottom step in the wide old hall and called Tom to turn out the light for me, as Jane had gone out.