And it didn’t take many minutes for me to slip into old summer-before-last—­also for the last time inside of those buttons—­and run through the garden, my heart singing, “Billy, Billy,” in a perfect rapture of tune.  I ran past the office door and found him in his cot almost asleep and we had a bear reunion in the rocker by the window that made us both breathless.

“What did you bring me, Molly?” he finally kissed under my right ear.

“A real base-ball and bat, lover, and an engine with five cars, a rake and a spade and a hoe, two blow-guns that pop a new way and something that squirts water and some other things.  Will that be enough?” I hugged him up anxiously, for sometimes he is hard to please and I might not have got the very thing he wanted.

“Thank you, Molly, all them things is what I want, but you oughter brung more’n that for three days not being here with me.”  Did any woman ever have a more lovely lover than that?  I don’t know how long I should have rocked him in the twilight if Doctor John’s voice hadn’t come across the hall in command.

“Put him down now, Mrs. Molly, and come and say other how-do-you-does,” he called softly.

It was a funny glad-to-see-him I felt as I came into the office where he was standing over by the window looking out at my garden in its twilight glow.  I think it is wrong for a woman to let her imagination kiss a man on the back of his neck even if she has known for some time that there is a little drake-tail lock of hair there just like his own son’s.  I gave him my hand and a good deal more of a smile and a blush than I intended.

He very far from kissed the hand; he held it just long enough to turn me around into the light and give me one long looking-over from head to feet.

“Just where does that corset press you worst?” he asked in the tone of voice he uses to say “poke out your tongue.”  So much of my Tennessee shooting-blood rose to my face that it is a wonder it didn’t drip; but I was cold enough to have hit at forty paces if I had had a shooting-iron in my hand.  As it was the coldness was the only missile that I had, but I used it to some effect.

“I am making a call on a friend, Doctor Moore, and not a consultation visit to my physician,” I said, looking into his face as though I had never seen him before.

“I beg your pardon, Molly,” he exclaimed and his face was redder than mine and then it went white with mortification.  I couldn’t stand that.

“Don’t do that way!” I exclaimed, and before I knew it I had taken hold of his hand and had it in both of mine.  “I know I look as if I was shrunk or laced, but I’m not!  I was going to tell you all about it and show it to you.  I’m really inches bigger in the right place and just—­just ‘controlled’, the woman called it, in the wrong place.  Please feel me and see,” and I offered myself to him for examination in the most regardless way.  He’s not at all like other people.