Then climbing up on the sturdy brass fender, she thrust her pink, impenetrable features right into the scared, pallid face of the shabby old clock and announced pointedly, "It's almost half-past seven. And I can stay till just eight o'clock!"

When she turned around again the Doctor was gone.

With a tiny shrug of her shoulders, she settled herself down then in a big, high-backed chair before the fire and stretched out her overshoed toes to the shining edge of the fender. As far as any apparent self-consciousness was concerned, she might just as well have been all alone in the room.

Convulsed with amusement, yet almost paralyzed by a certain stubborn, dumb sort of embarrassment, nothing on earth could have forced Stanton into making even an indefinite speech to the girl until she had made at least one perfectly definite and reasonably illuminating sort of speech to him. Biting his grinning lips into as straight a line as possible, he gathered up the scattered pages of the evening paper and attacked them furiously with scowling eyes.

After a really dreadful interim of silence, the mysterious little visitor rose in a gloomy, discouraged kind of way, and climbing up again on the narrow brass fender, peered once more into the face of the clock.

"It's twenty minutes of eight, now," she announced. Into her voice crept for the first time the faintest perceptible suggestion of a tremor. "It's twenty minutes of eight—now—and I've got to leave here exactly at eight. Twenty minutes is a rather—a rather stingy little bit out of a whole—lifetime," she added falteringly.

Then, and then only did Stanton's nervousness break forth suddenly into one wild, uproarious laugh that seemed to light up the whole dark, ominous room as though the gray, sulky, smoldering hearth-fire itself had exploded into iridescent flame. Chasing close behind the musical contagion of his deep guffaws followed the softer, gentler giggle of the dainty pink-veiled lady.

By the time they had both finished laughing it was fully quarter of eight.

"But you see it was just this way," explained the pleasant little voice—all alto notes again. Cautiously a slim, unringed hand burrowed out from the somber folds of the big cloak, and raised the pink mouth-mumbling veil as much as half an inch above the red-lipped speech line. "You see it was just this way. You paid me a lot of money—all in advance—for a six weeks' special edition de luxe Love-Letter Serial. And I spent your money the day I got it; and worse than that I owed it—long before I even got it! And worst of all, I've got a chance now to go home to-morrow for all the rest of the winter. No, I don't mean that exactly. I mean I've found a chance to go up to Vermont and have all my expenses paid—just for reading aloud every day to a lady who isn't so awfully deaf. But you see I still owe you a week's subscription—and I can't refund you the money because I haven't got it. And it happens that I can't run a fancy love-letter business from the special house that I'm going to. There aren't enough resources there—and all that. So I thought that perhaps—perhaps—considering how much you've been teasing and teasing to know who I was—I thought that perhaps if I came here this evening and let you really see me—that maybe, you know—maybe, not positively, but just maybe—you'd be willing to call that equivalent to one week's subscription. Would you?"

In the sharp eagerness of her question she turned her shrouded face full-view to Stanton's curious gaze, and he saw the little nervous, mischievous twitch of her lips at the edge of her masking pink veil resolve itself suddenly into a whimper of real pain. Yet so vivid were the lips, so blissfully, youthfully, lusciously carmine, that every single, individual statement she made seemed only like a festive little announcement printed in red ink.

"I guess I'm not a very—good business manager," faltered the red-lipped voice with incongruous pathos. "Indeed I know I'm not because—well because—the Serial-Letter Co. has 'gone broke! Bankrupt', is it, that you really say?"

With a little mockingly playful imitation of a stride she walked the first two fingers of her right hand across the surface of the table to Stanton's discarded supper dishes.

"Oh, please may I have that piece of cold toast?" she asked plaintively. No professional actress on the stage could have spoken the words more deliciously. Even to the actual crunching of the toast in her little shining white teeth, she sought to illustrate as fantastically as possible the ultimate misery of a bankrupt person starving for cold toast.

Stanton's spontaneous laughter attested his full appreciation of her mimicry.

"But I tell you the Serial-Letter Co. has 'gone broke'!" she persisted a trifle wistfully. "I guess—I guess it takes a man to really run a business with any sort of financial success, 'cause you see a man never puts anything except his head into his business. And of course if you only put your head into it, then you go right along giving always just a little wee bit less than 'value received'—and so you can't help, sir, making a profit. Why people would think you were plain, stark crazy if you gave them even one more pair of poor rubber boots than they'd paid for. But a woman! Well, you see my little business was a sort of a scheme to sell sympathy—perfectly good sympathy, you know—but to sell it to people who really needed it, instead of giving it away to people who didn't care anything about it at all. And you have to run that sort of business almost entirely with your heart—and you wouldn't feel decent at all, unless you delivered to everybody just a little tiny bit more sympathy than he paid for. Otherwise, you see you wouldn't be delivering perfectly good sympathy. So that's why—you understand now—that's why I had to send you my very own woolly blanket-wrapper, and my very own silver porringer, and my very own sling-shot that I fight city cats with,—because, you see, I had to use every single cent of your money right away to pay for the things that I'd already bought for other people."

"For other people?" quizzed Stanton a bit resentfully.

"Oh, yes," acknowledged the girl; "for several other people." Then, "Did you like the idea of the 'Rheumatic Nights Entertainment'?" she asked quite abruptly.

"Did I like it?" cried Stanton. "Did I like it?"

With a little shrugging air of apology the girl straightened up very stiffly in her chair.

"Of course it wasn't exactly an original idea," she explained contritely. "That is, I mean not original for you. You see, it's really a little club of mine—a little subscription club of rheumatic people who can't sleep; and I go every night in the week, an hour to each one of them. There are only three, you know. There's a youngish lady in Boston, and a very, very old gentleman out in Brookline, and the tiniest sort of a poor little sick girl in Cambridge. Sometimes I turn up just at supper-time and jolly them along a bit with their gruels. Sometimes I don't get around till ten or eleven o'clock in the great boo-black dark. From two to three in the morning seems to be the cruelest, grayest, coldest time for the little girl in Cambridge.... And I play the banjo decently well, you know, and sing more or less—and tell stories, or read aloud; and I most always go dressed up in some sort of a fancy costume 'cause I can't seem to find any other thing to do that astonishes sick people so much and makes them sit up so bravely and look so shiny. And really, it isn't such dreadfully hard work to do, because everything fits together so well. The short skirts, for instance, that turn me into such a jolly prattling great-grandchild for the poor old gentleman, make me just a perfectly rational, contemporaneous-looking play-mate for the small Cambridge girl. I'm so very, very little!"

"Only, of course," she finished wryly; "only, of course, it costs such a horrid big lot for costumes and carriages and things. That's what's 'busted' me, as the boys say. And then, of course, I'm most dreadfully sleepy all the day times when I ought to be writing nice things for my Serial-Letter Co. business. And then one day last week—" the vivid red lips twisted oddly at one corner. "One night last week they sent me word from Cambridge that the little, little girl was going to die—and was calling and calling for the 'Gray-Plush Squirrel Lady'. So I hired a big gray squirrel coat from a furrier whom I know, and I ripped up my muff and made me the very best sort of a hot, gray, smothery face that I could—and I went out to Cambridge and sat three hours on the footboard of a bed, cracking jokes—and nuts—to beguile a little child's death-pain. And somehow it broke my heart—or my spirit—or something. Somehow I think I could have stood it better with my own skin face! Anyway the little girl doesn't need me any more. Anyway, it doesn't matter if someone did need me!... I tell you I'm 'broke'! I tell you I haven't got one single solitary more thing to give! It isn't just my pocket-book that's empty: it's my head that's spent, too! It's my heart that's altogether stripped! And I'm going to run away! Yes, I am!"

Jumping to her feet she stood there for an instant all out of breath, as though just the mere fancy thought of running away had almost exhausted her. Then suddenly she began to laugh.

"I'm so tired of making up things," she confessed; "why, I'm so tired of making up grandfathers, I'm so tired of making up pirates, I'm so tired of making-up lovers—that I actually cherish the bill collector as the only real, genuine acquaintance whom I have in Boston. Certainly there's no slightest trace of pretence about him!... Excuse me for being so flippant," she added soberly, "but you see I haven't got any sympathy left even for myself."

"But for heaven's sake!" cried Stanton, "why don't you let somebody help you? Why don't you let me—"

"Oh, you can help me!" cried the little red-lipped voice excitedly. "Oh, yes, indeed you can help me! That's why I came here this evening. You see I've settled up now with every one of my creditors except you and the youngish Boston lady, and I'm on my way to her house now. We're reading Oriental Fairy stories together. Truly I think she'll be very glad indeed to release me from my contract when I offer her my coral beads instead, because they are dreadfully nice beads, my real, unpretended grandfather carved them for me himself.... But how can I settle with you? I haven't got anything left to settle with, and it might be months and months before I could refund the actual cash money. So wouldn't you—couldn't you please call my coming here this evening an equivalent to one week's subscription?"



Wriggling out of the cloak and veil that wrapped her like a chrysalis she emerged suddenly a glimmering, shimmering little oriental figure of satin and silver and haunting sandalwood—a veritable little incandescent rainbow of spangled moonlight and flaming scarlet and dark purple shadows. Great, heavy, jet-black curls caught back from her small piquant face by a blazing rhinestone fillet,—cheeks just a tiny bit over-tinted with rouge and excitement,—big, red-brown eyes packed full of high lights like a startled fawn's,—bold in the utter security of her masquerade, yet scared almost to death by the persistent underlying heart-thump of her unescapable self-consciousness,—altogether as tantalizing, altogether as unreal, as a vision out of the Arabian Nights, she stood there staring quizzically at Stanton.

"Would you call it—an—equivalent? Would you?" she asked nervously.

Then pirouetting over to the largest mirror in sight she began to smooth and twist her silken sash into place. Somewhere at wrist or ankle twittered the jingle of innumerable bangles.

"Oh! Don't I look—gorgeous!" she stammered. "O—h—h!"



VIII

Everything that was discreet and engaged-to-be-married in Stanton's conservative make-up exploded suddenly into one utterly irresponsible speech.

"You little witch!" he cried out. "You little beauty! For heaven's sake come over here and sit down in this chair where I can look at you! I want to talk to you! I—"

Pirouetting once more before the mirror, she divided one fleet glance between admiration for herself and scorn for Stanton.

"Oh, yes, I felt perfectly sure that you'd insist upon having me 'pretty'!" she announced sternly. Then courtesying low to the ground in mock humility, she began to sing-song mischievously:

"So Molly, Molly made-her-a-face, Made it of rouge and made it of lace. Long as the rouge and the lace are fair, Oh, Mr. Man, what do you care?"

"You don't need any rouge or lace to make you pretty!" Stanton fairly shouted in his vehemence. "Anybody might have known that that lovely, little mind of yours could only live in a—"

"Nonsense!" the girl interrupted, almost temperishly. Then with a quick, impatient sort of gesture she turned to the table, and picking up book after book, opened it and stared in it as though it had been a mirror. "Oh, maybe my mind is pretty enough," she acknowledged reluctantly. "But likelier than not, my face is not becoming—to me."

Crossing slowly over to Stanton's side she seated herself, with much jingling, rainbow-colored, sandalwood-scented dignity, in the chair that the Doctor had just vacated.

"Poor dear, you've been pretty sick, haven't you?" she mused gently. Cautiously then she reached out and touched the soft, woolly cuff of his blanket-wrapper. "Did you really like it?" she asked.

Stanton began to smile again. "Did I really like it?" he repeated joyously. "Why, don't you know that if it hadn't been for you I should have gone utterly mad these past few weeks? Don't you know that if it hadn't been for you—don't you know that if—" A little over-zealously he clutched at the tinsel fringe on the oriental lady's fan. "Don't you know—don't you know that I'm—engaged to be married?" he finished weakly.

The oriental lady shivered suddenly, as any lady might shiver on a November night in thin silken clothes. "Engaged to be married?" she stammered. "Oh, yes! Why—of course! Most men are! Really unless you catch a man very young and keep him absolutely constantly by your side you cannot hope to walk even into his friendship—except across the heart of some other woman." Again she shivered and jingled a hundred merry little bangles. "But why?" she asked abruptly, "why, if you're engaged to be married, did you come and—buy love-letters of me? My love-letters are distinctly for lonely people," she added severely.

"How dared you—How dared you go into the love-letter business in the first place?" quizzed Stanton dryly. "And when it comes to asking personal questions, how dared you send me printed slips in answer to my letters to you? Printed slips, mind you!... How many men are you writing love-letters to, anyway?"

The oriental lady threw out her small hands deprecatingly. "How many men? Only two besides yourself. There's such a fad for nature study these days that almost everybody this year has ordered the 'Gray-Plush Squirrel' series. But I'm doing one or two 'Japanese Fairies' for sick children, and a high school history class out in Omaha has ordered a weekly epistle from William of Orange."

"Hang the High School class out in Omaha!" said Stanton. "It was the love-letters that I was asking about."

"Oh, yes, I forgot," murmured the oriental lady. "Just two men besides yourself, I said, didn't I? Well one of them is a life convict out in an Illinois prison. He's subscribed for a whole year—for a fortnightly letter from a girl in Killarney who has got to be named 'Katie'. He's a very, very old man, I think, but I don't even know his name 'cause he's only a number now—'4632'—or something like that. And I have to send all my letters over to Killarney to be mailed—Oh, he's awfully particular about that. And it was pretty hard at first working up all the geography that he knew and I didn't. But—pshaw! You're not interested in Killarney. Then there's a New York boy down in Ceylon on a smelly old tea plantation. His people have dropped him, I guess, for some reason or other; so I'm just 'the girl from home' to him, and I prattle to him every month or so about the things he used to care about. It's easy enough to work that up from the social columns in the New York papers—and twice I've been over to New York to get special details for him; once to find out if his mother was really as sick as the Sunday paper said, and once—yes, really, once I butted in to a tea his sister was giving, and wrote him, yes, wrote him all about how the moths were eating up the big moose-head in his own front hall. And he sent an awfully funny, nice letter of thanks to the Serial-Letter Co.—yes, he did! And then there's a crippled French girl out in the Berkshires who is utterly crazy, it seems, about the 'Three Musketeers', so I'm d'Artagnan to her, and it's dreadfully hard work—in French—but I'm learning a lot out of that, and—"

"There. Don't tell me any more!" cried Stanton.

Then suddenly the pulses in his temples began to pound so hard and so loud that he could not seem to estimate at all just how loud he was speaking.

"Who are you?" he insisted. "Who are you? Tell me instantly, I say! Who are you anyway?"

The oriental lady jumped up in alarm. "I'm no one at all—to you," she said coolly, "except just—Molly Make-Believe."

Something in her tone seemed to fairly madden Stanton.

"You shall tell me who you are!" he cried. "You shall! I say you shall!"

Plunging forward he grabbed at her little bangled wrists and held them in a vise that sent the rheumatic pains shooting up his arms to add even further frenzy to his brain.

"Tell me who you are!" he grinned. "You shan't go out of here in ten thousand years till you've told me who you are!"

Frightened, infuriated, quivering with astonishment, the girl stood trying to wrench her little wrists out of his mighty grasp, stamping in perfectly impotent rage all the while with her soft-sandalled, jingling feet.

"I won't tell you who I am! I won't! I won't!" she swore and reswore in a dozen different staccato accents. The whole daring passion of the Orient that costumed her seemed to have permeated every fiber of her small being.

Then suddenly she drew in her breath in a long quivering sigh. Staring up into her face, Stanton gave a little groan of dismay, and released her hands.

"Why, Molly! Molly! You're—crying," he whispered. "Why, little girl! Why—"

Backing slowly away from him, she made a desperate effort to smile through her tears.

"Now you've spoiled everything," she said.

"Oh no, not—everything," argued Stanton helplessly from his chair, afraid to rise to his feet, afraid even to shuffle his slippers on the floor lest the slightest suspicion of vehemence on his part should hasten that steady, backward retreat of hers towards the door.

Already she had re-acquired her cloak and overshoes and was groping out somewhat blindly for her veil in a frantic effort to avoid any possible chance of turning her back even for a second on so dangerous a person as himself.

"Yes, everything," nodded the small grieved face. Yet the tragic, snuffling little sob that accompanied the words only served to add a most entrancing, tip-nosed vivacity to the statement.

"Oh, of course I know," she added hastily. "Oh, of course I know perfectly well that I oughtn't to have come alone to your rooms like this!" Madly she began to wind the pink veil round and round and round her cheeks like a bandage. "Oh, of course I know perfectly well that it wasn't even remotely proper! But don't you think—don't you think that if you've always been awfully, awfully strict and particular with yourself about things all your life, that you might have risked—safely—just one little innocent, mischievous sort of a half hour? Especially if it was the only possible way you could think of to square up everything and add just a little wee present besides? 'Cause nothing, you know, that you can afford to give ever seems exactly like giving a really, truly present. It's got to hurt you somewhere to be a 'present'. So my coming here this evening—this way—was altogether the bravest, scariest, unwisest, most-like-a-present-feeling-thing that I could possibly think of to do—for you. And even if you hadn't spoiled everything, I was going away to-morrow just the same forever and ever and ever!"

Cautiously she perched herself on the edge of a chair, and thrust her narrow, gold-embroidered toes into the wide, blunt depths of her overshoes. "Forever and ever!" she insisted almost gloatingly.

"Not forever and ever!" protested Stanton vigorously. "You don't think for a moment, do you, that after all this wonderful, jolly friendship of ours, you're going to drop right out of sight as though the earth had opened?"

Even the little quick, forward lurch of his shoulders in the chair sent the girl scuttling to her feet again, one overshoe still in her hand.

Just at the edge of the door-mat she turned and smiled at him mockingly. Really it had been a long time since she had smiled.

"Surely you don't think that you'd be able to recognize me in my street clothes, do you?" she asked bluntly.

Stanton's answering smile was quite as mocking as hers.

"Why not?" he queried. "Didn't I have the pleasure of choosing your winter hat for you? Let me see,—it was brown, with a pink rose—wasn't it? I should know it among a million."

With a little shrug of her shoulders she leaned back against the door and stared at him suddenly out of her big red-brown eyes with singular intentness.

"Well, will you call it an equivalent to one week's subscription?" she asked very gravely.

Some long-sleeping devil of mischief awoke in Stanton's senses.

"Equivalent to one whole week's subscription?" he repeated with mock incredulity. "A whole week—seven days and nights? Oh, no! No! No! I don't think you've given me, yet, more than about—four days' worth to think about. Just about four days' worth, I should think."

Pushing the pink veil further and further back from her features, with plainly quivering hands, the girl's whole soul seemed to blaze out at him suddenly, and then wince back again. Then just as quickly a droll little gleam of malice glinted in her eyes.

"Oh, all right then," she smiled. "If you really think I've given you only four days' and nights' worth of thoughts—here's something for the fifth day and night."

Very casually, yet still very accurately, her right hand reached out to the knob of the door.

"To cancel my debt for the fifth day," she said, "do you really 'honest-injun' want to know who I am? I'll tell you! First, you've seen me before."

"What?" cried Stanton, plunging forward in his chair.

Something in the girl's quick clutch of the door-knob warned him quite distinctly to relax again into his cushions.

"Yes," she repeated triumphantly. "And you've talked with me too, as often as twice! And moreover you've danced with me!"

Tossing her head with sudden-born daring she reached up and snatched off her curly black wig, and shook down all around her such a great, shining, utterly glorious mass of mahogany colored hair that Stanton's astonishment turned almost into faintness.

"What?" he cried out. "What? You say I've seen you before? Talked with you? Waltzed with you, perhaps? Never! I haven't! I tell you I haven't! I never saw that hair before! If I had, I shouldn't have forgotten it to my dying day. Why—"

With a little wail of despair she leaned back against the door. "You don't even remember me now?" she mourned. "Oh dear, dear, dear! And I thought you were so beautiful!" Then, woman-like, her whole sympathy rushed to defend him from her own accusations. "Oh, well, it was at a masquerade party," she acknowledged generously, "and I suppose you go to a great many masquerades."

Heaping up her hair like so much molten copper into the hood of her cloak, and trying desperately to snare all the wild, escaping tendrils with the softer mesh of her veil, she reached out a free hand at last and opened the door just a crack.

"And to give you something to think about for the sixth day and night," she resumed suddenly, with the same strange little glint in her eyes, "to give you something to think about the sixth day, I'll tell you that I really was hungry—when I asked you for your toast. I haven't had anything to eat to-day; and—"



Before she could finish the sentence Stanton had sprung from his chair, and stood trying to reason out madly whether one single more stride would catch her, or lose her.

"And as for something for you to think about the seventh day and night," she gasped hurriedly. Already the door had opened to her hand and her little figure stood silhouetted darkly against the bright, yellow-lighted hallway, "here's something for you to think about for twenty-seven days and nights!" Wildly her little hands went clutching at the woodwork. "I didn't know you were engaged to be married," she cried out passionately, "and I loved you—loved you—loved you!"

Then in a flash she was gone.



IX

With absolute finality the big door banged behind her. A minute later the street door, four flights down, rang out in jarring reverberation. A minute after that it seemed as though every door in every house on the street slammed shrilly. Then the charred fire-log sagged down into the ashes with a sad, puffing sigh. Then a whole row of books on a loosely packed shelf toppled over on each other with soft jocose slaps.

Crawling back into his Morris chair with every bone in his body aching like a magnetized wire-skeleton charged with pain, Stanton collapsed again into his pillows and sat staring—staring into the dying fire. Nine o'clock rang out dully from the nearest church spire; ten o'clock, eleven o'clock followed in turn with monotonous, chiming insistency. Gradually the relaxing steam-radiators began to grunt and grumble into a chill quietude. Gradually along the bare, bleak stretches of unrugged floor little cold draughts of air came creeping exploringly to his feet.

And still he sat staring—staring into the fast graying ashes.

"Oh, Glory! Glory!" he said. "Think what it would mean if all that wonderful imagination were turned loose upon just one fellow! Even if she didn't love you, think how she'd play the game! And if she did love you—Oh, lordy; Lordy! LORDY!"

Towards midnight, to ease the melancholy smell of the dying lamp, he drew reluctantly forth from his deepest blanket-wrapper pocket the little knotted handkerchief that encased the still-treasured handful of fragrant fir-balsam, and bending groaningly forward in his chair sifted the brittle, pungent needles into the face of the one glowing ember that survived. Instantly in a single dazzling flash of flame the tangible forest symbol vanished in intangible fragrance. But along the hollow of his hand,—across the edge of his sleeve,—up from the ragged pile of books and papers,—out from the farthest, remotest corners of the room, lurked the unutterable, undestroyable sweetness of all forests since the world was made.

Almost with a sob in his throat Stanton turned again to the box of letters on his table.

By dawn the feverish, excited sleeplessness in his brain had driven him on and on to one last, supremely fantastic impulse. Writing to Cornelia he told her bluntly, frankly,

"DEAR CORNELIA:

"When I asked you to marry me, you made me promise very solemnly at the time that if I ever changed my mind regarding you I would surely tell you. And I laughed at you. Do you remember? But you were right, it seems, and I was wrong. For I believe that I have changed my mind. That is:—I don't know how to express it exactly, but it has been made very, very plain to me lately that I do not by any manner of means love you as little as you need to be loved.

"In all sincerity,

"CARL."

To which surprising communication Cornelia answered immediately; but the 'immediately' involved a week's almost maddening interim,

"DEAR CARL:

"Neither mother nor I can make any sense whatsoever out of your note. By any possible chance was it meant to be a joke? You say you do not love me 'as little' as I need to be loved. You mean 'as much', don't you? Carl, what do you mean?"

Laboriously, with the full prospect of yet another week's agonizing strain and suspense, Stanton wrote again to Cornelia.

"DEAR CORNELIA:

"No, I meant 'as little' as you need to be loved. I have no adequate explanation to make. I have no adequate apology to offer. I don't think anything. I don't hope anything. All I know is that I suddenly believe positively that our engagement is a mistake. Certainly I am neither giving you all that I am capable of giving you, nor yet receiving from you all that I am capable of receiving. Just this fact should decide the matter I think.

"CARL."

Cornelia did not wait to write an answer to this. She telegraphed instead. The message even in the telegraph operator's handwriting looked a little nervous.

"Do you mean that you are tired of it?" she asked quite boldly.

With miserable perplexity Stanton wired back. "No, I couldn't exactly say that I was tired of it."

Cornelia's answer to that was fluttering in his hands within twelve hours.

"Do you mean that there is someone else?" The words fairly ticked themselves off the yellow page.

It was twenty-four hours before Stanton made up his mind just what to reply. Then, "No, I couldn't exactly say there is anybody else," he confessed wretchedly.

Cornelia's mother answered this time. The telegram fairly rustled with sarcasm. "You don't seem to be very sure about anything," said Cornelia's mother.

Somehow these words brought the first cheerful smile to his lips.

"No, you're quite right. I'm not at all sure about anything," he wired almost gleefully in return, wiping his pen with delicious joy on the edge of the clean white bed-spread.

Then because it is really very dangerous for over-wrought people to try to make any noise like laughter, a great choking, bitter sob caught him up suddenly, and sent his face burrowing down like a night-scared child into the safe, soft, feathery depths of his pillow—where, with his knuckles ground so hard into his eyes that all his tears were turned to stars, there came to him very, very slowly, so slowly in fact that it did not alarm him at all, the strange, electrifying vision of the one fact on earth that he was sure of: a little keen, luminous, brown-eyed face with a look in it, and a look for him only—so help him God!—such as he had never seen on the face of any other woman since the world was made. Was it possible?—was it really possible? Suddenly his whole heart seemed to irradiate light and color and music and sweet smelling things.



"Oh, Molly, Molly, Molly!" he shouted. "I want you! I want you!"

In the strange, lonesome days that followed, neither burly flesh-and-blood Doctor nor slim paper sweetheart tramped noisily over the threshold or slid thuddingly through the letter-slide.

No one apparently was ever coming to see Stanton again unless actually compelled to do so. Even the laundryman seemed to have skipped his usual day; and twice in succession the morning paper had most annoyingly failed to appear. Certainly neither the boldest private inquiry nor the most delicately worded public advertisement had proved able to discover the whereabouts of "Molly Make-Believe," much less succeeded in bringing her back. But the Doctor, at least, could be summoned by ordinary telephone, and Cornelia and her mother would surely be moving North eventually, whether Stanton's last message hastened their movements or not.

In subsequent experience it seemed to take two telephone messages to produce the Doctor. A trifle coolly, a trifle distantly, more than a trifle disapprovingly, he appeared at last and stared dully at Stanton's astonishing booted-and-coated progress towards health.

"Always glad to serve you—professionally," murmured the Doctor with an undeniably definite accent on the word 'professionally'.

"Oh, cut it out!" quoted Stanton emphatically. "What in creation are you so stuffy about?"

"Well, really," growled the Doctor, "considering the deception you practised on me—"

"Considering nothing!" shouted Stanton. "On my word of honor, I tell you I never consciously, in all my life before, ever—ever—set eyes upon that wonderful little girl, until that evening! I never knew that she even existed! I never knew! I tell you I never knew—anything!"

As limply as any stout man could sink into a chair, the Doctor sank into the seat nearest him.

"Tell me instantly all about it," he gasped.

"There are only two things to tell," said Stanton quite blithely. "And the first thing is what I've already stated, on my honor, that the evening we speak of was actually and positively the first time I ever saw the girl; and the second thing is, that equally upon my honor, I do not intend to let it remain—the last time!"

"But Cornelia?" cried the Doctor. "What about Cornelia?"

Almost half the sparkle faded from Stanton's eyes.

"Cornelia and I have annulled our engagement," he said very quietly. Then with more vehemence, "Oh, you old dry-bones, don't you worry about Cornelia! I'll look out for Cornelia. Cornelia isn't going to get hurt. I tell you I've figured and reasoned it all out very, very carefully; and I can see now, quite plainly, that Cornelia never really loved me at all—else she wouldn't have dropped me so accidentally through her fingers. Why, there never was even the ghost of a clutch in Cornelia's fingers."

"But you loved her," persisted the Doctor scowlingly.

It was hard, just that second, for Stanton to lift his troubled eyes to the Doctor's face. But he did lift them and he lifted them very squarely and steadily.

"Yes, I think I did—love Cornelia," he acknowledged frankly. "The very first time that I saw her I said to myself. 'Here is the end of my journey,' but I seem to have found out suddenly that the mere fact of loving a woman does not necessarily prove her that much coveted 'journey's end.' I don't know exactly how to express it, indeed I feel beastly clumsy about expressing it, but somehow it seems as though it were Cornelia herself who had proved herself, perfectly amiably, no 'journey's end' after all, but only a way station not equipped to receive my particular kind of a permanent guest. It isn't that I wanted any grand fixings. Oh, can't you understand that I'm not finding any fault with Cornelia. There never was any slightest pretence about Cornelia. She never, never even in the first place, made any possible effort to attract me. Can't you see that Cornelia looks to me to-day exactly the way that she looked to me in the first place; very, amazingly, beautiful. But a traveler, you know, cannot dally indefinitely to feed his eyes on even the most wonderful view while all his precious lifelong companions,—his whims, his hobbies, his cravings, his yearnings,—are crouching starved and unwelcome outside the door.

"And I can't even flatter myself," he added wryly; "I can't even flatter myself that my—going is going to inconvenience Cornelia in the slightest; because I can't see that my coming has made even the remotest perceptible difference in her daily routine. Anyway—" he finished more lightly, "when you come right down to 'mating', or 'homing', or 'belonging', or whatever you choose to call it, it seems to be written in the stars that plans or no plans, preferences or no preferences, initiatives or no initiatives, we belong to those—and to those only, hang it all!—who happen to love us most!"

Fairly jumping from his chair the Doctor snatched hold of Stanton's shoulder.

"Who happen to love us most?" he repeated wildly. "Love us? us? For heaven's sake, who's loving you now?"

Utterly irrelevantly, Stanton brushed him aside, and began to rummage anxiously among the books on his table.

"Do you know much about Vermont?" he asked suddenly. "It's funny, but almost nobody seems to know anything about Vermont. It's a darned good state, too, and I can't imagine why all the geographies neglect it so." Idly his finger seemed to catch in a half open pamphlet, and he bent down casually to straighten out the page. "Area in square miles—9,565," he read aloud musingly. "Principal products—hay, oats, maple-sugar—" Suddenly he threw down the pamphlet and flung himself into the nearest chair and began to laugh. "Maple-sugar?" he ejaculated. "Maple-sugar? Oh, glory! And I suppose there are some people who think that maple-sugar is the sweetest thing that ever came out of Vermont!"

The Doctor started to give him some fresh advice—but left him a bromide instead.



X

Though the ensuing interview with Cornelia and her mother began quite as coolly as the interview with the Doctor, it did not happen to end even in hysterical laughter.

It was just two days after the Doctor's hurried exit that Stanton received a formal, starchy little note from Cornelia's mother notifying him of their return.

Except for an experimental, somewhat wobbly-kneed journey or two to the edge of the Public Garden he had made no attempts as yet to resume any outdoor life, yet for sundry personal reasons of his own he did not feel over-anxious to postpone the necessary meeting. In the immediate emergency at hand strong courage was infinitely more of an asset than strong knees. Filling his suitcase at once with all the explanatory evidence that he could carry, he proceeded on cab-wheels to Cornelia's grimly dignified residence. The street lamps were just beginning to be lighted when he arrived.

As the butler ushered him gravely into the beautiful drawing room he realized with a horrid sinking of the heart that Cornelia and her mother were already sitting there waiting for him with a dreadful tight lipped expression on their faces which seemed to suggest that though he was already fifteen minutes ahead of his appointment they had been waiting for him there since early dawn.

The drawing room itself was deliciously familiar to him; crimson-curtained, green carpeted, shining with heavy gilt picture frames and prismatic chandeliers. Often with posies and candies and theater-tickets he had strutted across that erstwhile magic threshold and fairly lolled in the big deep-upholstered chairs while waiting for the silk-rustling advent of the ladies. But now, with his suitcase clutched in his hand, no Armenian peddler of laces and ointments could have felt more grotesquely out of his element.

Indolently Cornelia's mother lifted her lorgnette and gazed at him skeptically from the spot just behind his left ear where the barber had clipped him too short, to the edge of his right heel that the bootblack had neglected to polish. Apparently she did not even see the suitcase but,

"Oh, are you leaving town?" she asked icily.

Only by the utmost tact on his part did he finally succeed in establishing tete-a-tete relations with Cornelia herself; and even then if the house had been a tower ten stories high, Cornelia's mother, rustling up the stairs, could not have swished her skirts any more definitely like a hissing snake.

In absolute dumbness Stanton and Cornelia sat listening until the horrid sound died away. Then, and then only, did Cornelia cross the room to Stanton's side and proffer him her hand. The hand was very cold, and the manner of offering it was very cold, but Stanton was quite man enough to realize that this special temperature was purely a matter of physical nervousness rather than of mental intention.

Slipping naturally into the most conventional groove either of word or deed, Cornelia eyed the suitcase inquisitively.

"What are you doing?" she asked thoughtlessly. "Returning my presents?"

"You never gave me any presents!" said Stanton cheerfully.

"Why, didn't I?" murmured Cornelia slowly. Around her strained mouth a smile began to flicker faintly. "Is that why you broke it off?" she asked flippantly.

"Yes, partly," laughed Stanton.

Then Cornelia laughed a little bit, too.

After this Stanton lost no possible time in getting down to facts.

Stooping over from his chair exactly after the manner of peddlers whom he had seen in other people's houses, he unbuckled the straps of his suitcase, and turned the cover backward on the floor.

Cornelia followed every movement of his hand with vaguely perplexed blue eyes.

"Surely," said Stanton, "this is the weirdest combination of circumstances that ever happened to a man and a girl—or rather, I should say, to a man and two girls." Quite accustomed as he now was to the general effect on himself of the whole unique adventure with the Serial-Letter Co. his heart could not help giving a little extra jump on this, the verge of the astonishing revelation that he was about to make to Cornelia. "Here," he stammered, a tiny bit out of breath, "here is the small, thin, tissue-paper circular that you sent me from the Serial-Letter Co. with your advice to subscribe, and there—" pointing earnestly to the teeming suitcase,—"there are the minor results of—having taken your advice."

In Cornelia's face the well-groomed expression showed sudden signs of immediate disorganization.

Snatching the circular out of his hand she read it hurriedly, once, twice, three times. Then kneeling cautiously down on the floor with all the dignity that characterized every movement of her body, she began to poke here and there into the contents of the suitcase.



"The 'minor results'?" she asked soberly.

"Why yes," said Stanton. "There were several things I didn't have room to bring. There was a blanket-wrapper. And there was a—girl, and there was a—"

Cornelia's blonde eyebrows lifted perceptibly. "A girl—whom you didn't know at all—sent you a blanket-wrapper?" she whispered.

"Yes!" smiled Stanton. "You see no girl whom I knew—very well—seemed to care a hang whether I froze to death or not."

"O—h," said Cornelia very, very slowly, "O—h." Her eyes had a strange, new puzzled expression in them like the expression of a person who was trying to look outward and think inward at the same time.

"But you mustn't be so critical and haughty about it all," protested Stanton, "when I'm really trying so hard to explain everything perfectly honestly to you—so that you'll understand exactly how it happened."

"I should like very much to be able to understand exactly how it happened," mused Cornelia.

Gingerly she approached in succession the roll of sample wall-paper, the maps, the time-tables, the books, the little silver porringer, the intimate-looking scrap of unfinished fancy-work. One by one Stanton explained them to her, visualizing by eager phrase or whimsical gesture the particularly lonesome and susceptible conditions under which each gift had happened to arrive.

At the great pile of letters Cornelia's hand faltered a trifle.

"How many did I write you?" she asked with real curiosity.

"Five thin ones, and a postal-card," said Stanton almost apologetically.

Choosing the fattest looking letter that she could find, Cornelia toyed with the envelope for a second. "Would it be all right for me to read one?" she asked doubtfully.

"Why, yes," said Stanton. "I think you might read one."

After a few minutes she laid down the letter without any comment.

"Would it be all right for me to read another?" she questioned.

"Why, yes," cried Stanton. "Let's read them all. Let's read them together. Only, of course, we must read them in order."

Almost tenderly he picked them up and sorted them out according to their dates. "Of course," he explained very earnestly, "of course I wouldn't think of showing these letters to any one ordinarily; but after all, these particular letters represent only a mere business proposition, and certainly this particular situation must justify one in making extraordinary exceptions."

One by one he perused the letters hastily and handed them over to Cornelia for her more careful inspection. No single associate detail of time or circumstance seemed to have eluded his astonishing memory. Letter by letter, page by page he annotated: "That was the week you didn't write at all," or "This was the stormy, agonizing, God-forsaken night when I didn't care whether I lived or died," or "It was just about that time, you know, that you snubbed me for being scared about your swimming stunt."

Breathless in the midst of her reading Cornelia looked up and faced him squarely. "How could any girl—write all that nonsense?" she gasped.

It wasn't so much what Stanton answered, as the expression in his eyes that really startled Cornelia.

"Nonsense?" he quoted deliberatingly. "But I like it," he said. "It's exactly what I like."

"But I couldn't possibly have given you anything like—that," stammered Cornelia.

"No, I know you couldn't," said Stanton very gently.

For an instant Cornelia turned and stared a bit resentfully into his face. Then suddenly the very gentleness of his smile ignited a little answering smile on her lips.

"Oh, you mean," she asked with unmistakable relief; "oh, you mean that really after all it wasn't your letter that jilted me, but my temperament that jilted you?"

"Exactly," said Stanton.

Cornelia's whole somber face flamed suddenly into unmistakable radiance.

"Oh, that puts an entirely different light upon the matter," she exclaimed. "Oh, now it doesn't hurt at all!"

Rustling to her feet, she began to smooth the scowly-looking wrinkles out of her skirt with long even strokes of her bright-jeweled hands.

"I think I'm really beginning to understand," she said pleasantly. "And truly, absurd as it sounds to say it, I honestly believe that I care more for you this moment than I ever cared before, but—" glancing with acute dismay at the cluttered suitcase on the floor, "but I wouldn't marry you now, if we could live in the finest asylum in the land!"

Shrugging his shoulders with mirthful appreciation Stanton proceeded then and there to re-pack his treasures and end the interview.

Just at the edge of the threshold Cornelia's voice called him back.

"Carl," she protested, "you are looking rather sick. I hope you are going straight home."

"No, I'm not going straight home," said Stanton bluntly. "But here's hoping that the 'longest way round' will prove even yet the very shortest possible route to the particular home that, as yet, doesn't even exist. I'm going hunting, Cornelia, hunting for Molly Make-Believe; and what's more, I'm going to find her if it takes me all the rest of my natural life!"



XI

Driving downtown again with every thought in his head, every plan, every purpose, hurtling around and around in absolute chaos, his roving eyes lit casually upon the huge sign of a detective bureau that loomed across the street. White as a sheet with the sudden new determination that came to him, and trembling miserably with the very strength of the determination warring against the weakness and fatigue of his body, he dismissed his cab and went climbing up the first narrow, dingy stairway that seemed most liable to connect with the brain behind the sign-board.

It was almost bed-time before he came down the stairs again, yet, "I think her name is Meredith, and I think she's gone to Vermont, and she has the most wonderful head of mahogany-colored hair that I ever saw in my life," were the only definite clues that he had been able to contribute to the cause.

In the slow, lagging week that followed, Stanton did not find himself at all pleased with the particular steps which he had apparently been obliged to take in order to ferret out Molly's real name and her real city address, but the actual audacity of the situation did not actually reach its climax until the gentle little quarry had been literally tracked to Vermont with detectives fairly baying on her trail like the melodramatic bloodhounds that pursue "Eliza" across the ice.

"Red-headed party found at Woodstock," the valiant sleuth had wired with unusual delicacy and caution.

"Denies acquaintance, Boston, everything, positively refuses interview, temper very bad, sure it's the party," the second message had come.

The very next northward-bound train found Stanton fretting the interminable hours away between Boston and Woodstock. Across the sparkling snow-smothered landscape his straining eyes went plowing on to their unknown destination. Sometimes the engine pounded louder than his heart. Sometimes he could not even seem to hear the grinding of the brakes above the dreadful throb-throb of his temples. Sometimes in horrid, shuddering chills he huddled into his great fur-coat and cursed the porter for having a disposition like a polar bear. Sometimes almost gasping for breath he went out and stood on the bleak rear platform of the last car and watched the pleasant, ice-cold rails go speeding back to Boston. All along the journey little absolutely unnecessary villages kept bobbing up to impede the progress of the train. All along the journey innumerable little empty railroad-stations, barren as bells robbed of their own tongues, seemed to lie waiting—waiting for the noisy engine-tongue to clang them into temporary noise and life.

Was his quest really almost at an end? Was it—was it? A thousand vague apprehensions tortured through his mind.

And then, all of a sudden, in the early, brisk winter twilight, Woodstock—happened!

Climbing out of the train Stanton stood for a second rubbing his eyes at the final abruptness and unreality of it all. Woodstock! What was it going to mean to him? Woodstock!

Everybody else on the platform seemed to be accepting the astonishing geographical fact with perfect simplicity. Already along the edge of the platform the quaint, old-fashioned yellow stage-coaches set on runners were fast filling up with utterly serene passengers.

A jog at his elbow made him turn quickly, and he found himself gazing into the detective's not ungenial face.

"Say," said the detective, "were you going up to the hotel first? Well you'd better not. You'd better not lose any time. She's leaving town in the morning." It was beyond human nature for the detective man not to nudge Stanton once in the ribs. "Say," he grinned, "you sure had better go easy, and not send in your name or anything." His grin broadened suddenly in a laugh. "Say," he confided, "once in a magazine I read something about a lady's 'piquant animosity'. That's her! And cute? Oh, my!"

Five minutes later, Stanton found himself lolling back in the quaintest, brightest, most pumpkin-colored coach of all, gliding with almost magical smoothness through the snow-glazed streets of the little narrow, valley-town.

"The Meredith homestead?" the driver had queried. "Oh, yes. All right; but it's quite a journey. Don't get discouraged."

A sense of discouragement regarding long distances was just at that moment the most remote sensation in Stanton's sensibilities. If the railroad journey had seemed unhappily drawn out, the sleigh-ride reversed the emotion to the point of almost telescopic calamity: a stingy, transient vista of village lights; a brief, narrow, hill-bordered road that looked for all the world like the aisle of a toy-shop, flanked on either side by high-reaching shelves where miniature house-lights twinkled cunningly; a sudden stumble of hoofs into a less-traveled snow-path, and then, absolutely unavoidable, absolutely unescapable, an old, white colonial house with its great solemn elm trees stretching out their long arms protectingly all around and about it after the blessed habit of a hundred years.

Nervously, and yet almost reverently, Stanton went crunching up the snowy path to the door, knocked resonantly with a slim, much worn old brass knocker, and was admitted promptly and hospitably by "Mrs. Meredith" herself—Molly's grandmother evidently, and such a darling little grandmother, small, like Molly; quick, like Molly; even young, like Molly, she appeared to be. Simple, sincere, and oh, so comfortable—like the fine old mahogany furniture and the dull-shining pewter, and the flickering firelight, that seemed to be everywhere.

"Good old stuff!" was Stanton's immediate silent comment on everything in sight.

It was perfectly evident that the little old lady knew nothing whatsoever about Stanton, but it was equally evident that she suspected him of being neither a highwayman nor a book agent, and was really sincerely sorry that Molly had "a headache" and would be unable to see him.

"But I've come so far," persisted Stanton. "All the way from Boston. Is she very ill? Has she been ill long?"

The little old lady's mind ignored the questions but clung a trifle nervously to the word Boston.

"Boston?" her sweet voice quavered. "Boston? Why you look so nice—surely you're not that mysterious man who has been annoying Mollie so dreadfully these past few days. I told her no good would ever come of her going to the city."

"Annoying Molly?" cried Stanton. "Annoying my Molly? I? Why, it's to prevent anybody in the whole wide world from ever annoying her again about—anything, that I've come here now!" he persisted rashly. "And don't you see—we had a little misunderstanding and—"

Into the little old lady's ivory cheek crept a small, bright, blush-spot.

"Oh, you had a little misunderstanding," she repeated softly. "A little quarrel? Oh, is that why Molly has been crying so much ever since she came home?"

Very gently she reached out her tiny, blue-veined hand, and turned Stanton's big body around so that the lamp-light smote him squarely on his face.

"Are you a good boy?" she asked. "Are you good enough for—my—little Molly?"

Impulsively Stanton grabbed her small hands in his big ones, and raised them very tenderly to his lips.



"Oh, little Molly's little grandmother," he said; "nobody on the face of this snow-covered earth is good enough for your Molly, but won't you give me a chance? Couldn't you please give me a chance? Now—this minute? Is she so very ill?"

"No, she's not so very ill, that is, she's not sick in bed," mused the old lady waveringly. "She's well enough to be sitting up in her big chair in front of her open fire."

"Big chair—open fire?" quizzed Stanton. "Then, are there two chairs?" he asked casually.

"Why, yes," answered the little-grandmother in surprise.

"And a mantelpiece with a clock on it?" he probed.

The little-grandmother's eyes opened wide and blue with astonishment.

"Yes," she said, "but the clock hasn't gone for forty years!"

"Oh, great!" exclaimed Stanton. "Then won't you please—please—I tell you it's a case of life or death—won't you please go right upstairs and sit down in that extra big chair—and not say a word or anything but just wait till I come? And of course," he said, "it wouldn't be good for you to run upstairs, but if you could hurry just a little I should be so much obliged."

As soon as he dared, he followed cautiously up the unfamiliar stairs, and peered inquisitively through the illuminating crack of a loosely closed door.

The grandmother as he remembered her was dressed in some funny sort of a dullish purple, but peeping out from the edge of one of the chairs he caught an unmistakable flutter of blue.

Catching his breath he tapped gently on the woodwork.

Round the big winged arm of the chair a wonderful, bright aureole of hair showed suddenly.

"Come in," faltered Molly's perplexed voice.

All muffled up in his great fur-coat he pushed the door wide open and entered boldly.

"It's only Carl," he said. "Am I interrupting you?"

The really dreadful collapsed expression on Molly's face Stanton did not appear to notice at all. He merely walked over to the mantelpiece, and leaning his elbows on the little cleared space in front of the clock, stood staring fixedly at the time-piece which had not changed its quarter-of-three expression for forty years.

"It's almost half-past seven," he announced pointedly, "and I can stay till just eight o'clock."

Only the little grandmother smiled.

Almost immediately: "It's twenty minutes of eight now!" he announced severely.

"My, how time flies!" laughed the little grandmother.

When he turned around again the little grandmother had fled.

But Molly did not laugh, as he himself had laughed on that faraway, dreamlike evening in his rooms. Instead of laughter, two great tears welled up in her eyes and glistened slowly down her flushing cheeks.

"What if this old clock hasn't moved a minute in forty years?" whispered Stanton passionately, "it's such a stingy little time to eight o'clock—even if the hands never get there!"

Then turning suddenly to Molly he held out his great strong arms to her.

"Oh, Molly, Molly!" he cried out beseechingly, "I love you! And I'm free to love you! Won't you please come to me?"



Sliding very cautiously out of the big, deep chair, Molly came walking hesitatingly towards him. Like a little wraith miraculously tinted with bronze and blue she stopped and faced him piteously for a second.

Then suddenly she made a little wild rush into his arms and burrowed her small frightened face in his shoulder.

"Oh, Carl, Sweetheart!" she cried. "I can really love you now? Love you, Carl—love you! And not have to be just Molly Make-Believing any more!"

THE END.