self. Could this slow, pale, dead-eyed, slim,
drooping girl be the rollicking child of a 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 devil 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 had fastened
the neck button 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 on
the five-down train instead of the six-up and I fairly reeled to the
window and peeped through the shutters.

They were all in a laughing group around him, with Tom as master of
ceremonies, and Ruth Chester 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 do now! I know 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 tail 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
together with one hand and ran through my garden right over a bed of
savage tiger-lilies and flung myself into John Moore's office, 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 fat 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 a half-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 und