They were all in a laughing group around him, with Tom as master of ceremonies, and Ruth Clinton was looking up into his face with an expression I am glad I can never forget.  It killed all my regrets on the score of his future.

It took two good looks to take him all in, and then I must have missed some of him, for, all in all, he was so large that he stretched your eyes to behold him.  He’s grown seven feet tall, I don’t know how many pounds he weighs, and I don’t want anybody ever to tell me!

I had never thought enough about evolution to know whether I believed in it and woman’s suffrage.  But I know now that millions of years ago a great, big, distinguished hippopotamus stepped out of the woods and frightened one of my foremothers so that she turned and fled through a thicket that almost tore her limb from limb, right into the arms of her own mate.  That’s what I did!  I caught that blue satin belt and hooked it together with one hand and ran through my garden right over a bed of savage tiger-lilies and flung myself into John Moore’s surgery, slammed the door and backed up against it.

“He’s come!” I gasped.  “And I’m frightened to death, with nobody but you to run to.  Hide me quick!  He’s large and coarse-looking, 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 half a 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 I was 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 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.

“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, for if I go on loving you as I have been for the last few minutes it will make you uncomfortable.”