Molly who had looked out of
that mirror at me one short week ago? Where were the wings on her heels,
the glint in her curls, the laugh on her mouth, and the light in her
eyes?

Slowly at last I lifted the blue muslin, twenty-three-inch waist shroud
and let it slip over my head and fall slimly around me. I was fastening
the buttons behind and was fumbling the next one into the buttonhole
when I suddenly heard laughing excited voices coming up the side street
that ran just under my west window. Something told me that Alfred had
come by the five-down train instead of the six-up, and I fairly reeled
to the window and peeped through the venetian blind.

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,