sing 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 known how hard
some of it was and I haven't been able to eat as much as I usually do
thinking how hungry you are? But isn't it all worth it? I think it is.
Alfred Bennett is a very great man and it is right that he should have a
very lovely wife to go out into the world with him. And as lovely as you
are I think it is wonderful of you to make all th