Then suddenly he stretched out his little arms to me and the dimples winked at me from all over his darling face.

“Molly, Molly,” he said with a perfect rapture of chuckles in his voice, “now you look just as pretty as you do when you go to bed; all whity all over.  You can kiss my kiss-spot a hundred times while I bear-hug you for that nice not-black dress,” and before any stern person could have stopped us I was on my knees on the grass kissing my fill from the “kiss-spot” on the back of his neck, while he hugged all the starch out of the summer-before-last.

And Doctor John sat down on the bench quick and laughed out loud one of the very few times I ever heard him do it.  He was looking down at us, but I didn’t laugh up into his eyes.  I was afraid.  I felt it was safer to go on kissing the kiss-spot for the present, anyway.

“Bill,” he said, with his voice dancing, “that’s the most effective apology I ever heard.  You were sorry to some point.”

Then suddenly Billy stiffened right in my arms and looked me straight in the face and said in the doctor’s own brisk tones, even with his cupid mouth set in the same straight line: 

“I say I’m sorry, Molly, but damn that man and I’ll git him yet!”

What could we say?  What could we do?  We didn’t try.  I busied myself in tying the string on Billy’s blouse that had come untied in the bear-hug and the doctor suddenly discovered the letter on the bench.  I saw him see it without looking in his direction at all.

“And how many pounds are we nearer the string-bean state of existence, Mrs. Molly?” he asked me before I had finished tying the blouse, in the nicest voice in the world, fairly crackling with friendship and good humor and hateful things like that.  Why I should have wanted him to huff over that letter is more than I can say.  But I did; and he didn’t.

“Over twenty, and most of the time I am so hungry I could eat Aunt Adeline.  I dream about Billy, fried with cream gravy,” I answered, as I kissed again the back of the head that was beginning to nod down against my breast.  Long shadows lay across the garden and the white-headed old snow-ball was signaling out of the dusk to a Dorothy Perkins down the walk in a scandalous way.  At best, spring is just the world’s match-making old chaperon and ought to be watched.  I still sat on the grass and I began to cuddle Billy’s bare knees in the skirt of my dress so the chigres couldn’t get at them.

“But, Mrs. Molly, isn’t it worth it all?” asked the doctor as he bent over toward us and looked down with something wonderful and kind in his eyes that seemed to rest on us like a benediction.  “You have been just as plucky as a girl can be and in only a little over two months you have grown as lightfooted and hearty as a boy. I think nothing could be lovelier than you are right now, but you can get off those other few pounds if you want to.  You know, don’t you, that I have