“Blossom,” 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 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.

“Don’t women know, John?” I managed to ask softly in memory of a like question he had put to me across that bread and jam with the rose a-listening from the dark.

What brought me to consciousness was his fumbling with the lace on that blue muslin relict of a sentiment.  The lace had got caught on his sleeve buttons.

“Please don’t forget that that is his possession,” I laughed under his chin.  “I’m still scared to death of him, and you haven’t hid me yet!”

“Molly,” he asked, this time with a heaven-laugh, “where could you be more effectually hid from Alfred Bennett than in my arms?”

I spent ten minutes telling Billy what a hippopotamus really looks like as I put him to bed, but later, much as I should have liked to, I couldn’t consume that horrible dinner, that I had helped prepare at the Johnsons’, in the shelter of John’s arms, and I had to face Alfred.  Ruth Clinton was there, and she faced him too.

A man that can’t be happy with a woman who is willing to “fulfil his destiny” doesn’t deserve to be.

Then we came over here, and John had the most beautiful time persuading Aunt Adeline how a good man like Mr. Carter would want his young widow to be taken care of by being married to a safe friend of his instead of being flighty and having folks wondering whom she would marry.

“You know yourself how hard a time a beautiful young widow has, Mrs. Henderson,” he said in the tone of voice that always makes his patients glad to take his worst doses.  He got his blessing and me—­with a warning.

A lovely night wind is blowing across my garden and bringing me congratulations from all my flower family.  Flowers are a part of love and the wooing of it, and they understand.  I am waiting for the light to go out behind the tall trees over which the moon is stealthily sinking.  He promised me to put it out at once, and I’m watching the glow that marks the place where my own two men creatures are going to rest, with my heart in full song.

He needs rest, he is so very tired and worn.  He confessed it as I stood on the step above him to-night, after he had taken his own good night from me out under the oak-tree.  When he explained to me how his agony over me for all these months had kept him walking the floor night after night, not knowing that I was waiting for the light to go out, I gave myself a sweetness that I am going to say a prayer for the last thing before I sleep.  I took his head in my arms and put my lips to that drake-tail kiss-spot that has tempted me for I won’t say how long.  Then I fled—­and so did he!