[Ill.u.s.tration: Every girl like Cornelia had to go South sometime between November and March]

"Why Cornelia _had_ to go South," he reasoned conscientiously. "Every girl like Cornelia _had_ to go South sometime between November and March. How could any mere man even hope to keep rare, choice, exquisite creatures like that cooped up in a slushy, snowy New England city--when all the bright, gorgeous, rose-blooming South was waiting for them with open arms? 'Open arms'! Apparently it was only 'climates' that were allowed any such privileges with girls like Cornelia. Yet, after all, wasn't it just exactly that very quality of serene, dignified aloofness that had attracted him first to Cornelia among the score of freer-mannered girls of his acquaintance?"

Glumly reverting to his morning paper, he began to read and reread with dogged persistence each item of politics and foreign news--each gibbering advertis.e.m.e.nt.

At noon the postman dropped some kind of a message through the slit in the door, but the plainly discernible green one-cent stamp forbade any possible hope that it was a letter from the South. At four o'clock again someone thrust an offensive pink gas bill through the letter-slide. At six o'clock Stanton stubbornly shut his eyes up perfectly tight and m.u.f.fled his ears in the pillow so that he would not even know whether the postman came or not. The only thing that finally roused him to plain, grown-up sense again was the joggle of the janitor's foot kicking mercilessly against the bed.

"Here's your supper," growled the janitor.

On the bare tin tray, tucked in between the cup of gruel and the slice of toast loomed an envelope--a real, rather fat-looking envelope.

Instantly from Stanton's mind vanished every conceivable sad thought concerning Cornelia. With his heart thumping like the heart of any love-sick school girl, he reached out and grabbed what he supposed was Cornelia's letter.

But it was post-marked, "Boston"; and the handwriting was quite plainly the handwriting of The Serial-Letter Co.

Muttering an exclamation that was not altogether pretty he threw the letter as far as he could throw it out into the middle of the floor, and turning back to his supper began to crunch his toast furiously like a dragon crunching bones.

At nine o'clock he was still awake. At ten o'clock he was still awake.

At eleven o'clock he was still awake. At twelve o'clock he was still awake.... At one o'clock he was almost crazy. By quarter past one, as though fairly hypnotized, his eyes began to rivet themselves on the little bright spot in the rug where the "serial-letter" lay gleaming whitely in a beam of electric light from the street. Finally, in one supreme, childish impulse of petulant curiosity, he scrambled shiveringly out of his blankets with many "O--h's" and "O-u-c-h-'s,"

recaptured the letter, and took it growlingly back to his warm bed.

Worn out quite as much with the grinding monotony of his rheumatic pains as with their actual acuteness, the new discomfort of straining his eyes under the feeble rays of his night-light seemed almost a pleasant diversion.

The envelope was certainly fat. As he ripped it open, three or four folded papers like sleeping-powders, all duly numbered, "1 A. M.," "2 A. M.," "3 A. M.," "4 A. M." fell out of it. With increasing inquisitiveness he drew forth the letter itself.

"Dear Honey," said the letter quite boldly. Absurd as it was, the phrase crinkled Stanton's heart just the merest trifle.

"DEAR HONEY:

"There are so many things about your sickness that worry me.

Yes there are! I worry about your pain. I worry about the horrid food that you're probably getting. I worry about the coldness of your room. But most of anything in the world I worry about your _sleeplessness_. Of course you _don't_ sleep! That's the trouble with rheumatism. It's such an old Night-Nagger. Now do you know what I'm going to do to you?

I'm going to evolve myself into a sort of a Rheumatic Nights Entertainment--for the sole and explicit purpose of trying to while away some of your long, dark hours. Because if you've simply _got_ to stay awake all night long and think--you might just as well be thinking about ME, Carl Stanton. What? Do you dare smile and suggest for a moment that just because of the Absence between us I cannot make myself vivid to you? Ho! Silly boy! Don't you know that the plainest sort of black ink throbs more than some blood--and the touch of the softest hand is a harsh caress compared to the touch of a reasonably shrewd pen? Here--now, I say--this very moment: Lift this letter of mine to your face, and swear--if you're honestly able to--that you can't smell the rose in my hair! A cinnamon rose, would you say--a yellow, flat-faced cinnamon rose? Not quite so lusciously fragrant as those in your grandmother's July garden? A trifle paler?

Perceptibly cooler? Something forced into blossom, perhaps, behind brittle gla.s.s, under barren winter moonshine? And yet--A-h-h! Hear me laugh! You didn't really mean to let yourself lift the page and smell it, did you? But what did I tell you?

"I mustn't waste too much time, though, on this nonsense.

What I really wanted to say to you was: Here are four--not 'sleeping potions', but waking potions--just four silly little bits of news for you to think about at one o'clock, and two, and three--and four, if you happen to be so miserable to-night as to be awake even then.

"With my love,

"MOLLY."

Whimsically, Stanton rummaged around in the creases of the bed-spread and extricated the little folded paper marked, "No. 1 o'clock." The news in it was utterly brief.

"My hair is red," was all that it announced.

With a sniff of amus.e.m.e.nt Stanton collapsed again into his pillows.

For almost an hour then he lay considering solemnly whether a red-headed girl could possibly be pretty. By two o'clock he had finally visualized quite a striking, Juno-esque type of beauty with a figure about the regal height of Cornelia's, and blue eyes perhaps just a trifle hazier and more mischievous.

But the little folded paper marked, "No. 2 o'clock," announced destructively: "My eyes are brown. And I am _very_ little."

With an absurdly resolute intention to "play the game" every bit as genuinely as Miss Serial-Letter Co. was playing it, Stanton refrained quite heroically from opening the third dose of news until at least two big, resonant city clocks had insisted that the hour was ripe. By that time the grin in his face was almost bright enough of itself to illuminate any ordinary page.

"I am lame," confided the third message somewhat depressingly. Then snugglingly in parenthesis like the tickle of lips against his ear whispered the one phrase: "My picture is in the fourth paper,--if you should happen still to be awake at four o'clock."

Where now was Stanton's boasted sense of honor concerning the ethics of playing the game according to directions? "Wait a whole hour to see what Molly looked like? Well he guessed not!" Fumbling frantically under his pillow and across the medicine stand he began to search for the missing "No. 4 o'clock." Quite out of breath, at last he discovered it lying on the floor a whole arm's length away from the bed. Only with a really acute stab of pain did he finally succeed in reaching it. Then with fingers fairly trembling with effort, he opened forth and disclosed a tiny snap-shot photograph of a grim-jawed, scrawny-necked, much be-spectacled elderly dame with a huge gray pompadour.

[Ill.u.s.tration: An elderly dame]

"Stung!" said Stanton.

Rheumatism or anger, or something, buzzed in his heart like a bee the rest of the night.

Fortunately in the very first mail the next morning a postal-card came from Cornelia--such a pretty postal-card too, with a bright-colored picture of an inordinately "riggy" looking ostrich staring over a neat wire fence at an eager group of unmistakably Northern tourists.

Underneath the picture was written in Cornelia's own precious hand the heart-thrilling information:

"We went to see the Ostrich Farm yesterday. It was really very interesting. C."

III

For quite a long time Stanton lay and considered the matter judicially from every possible point of view. "It would have been rather pleasant," he mused "to know who 'we' were." Almost childishly his face cuddled into the pillow. "She might at least have told me the name of the ostrich!" he smiled grimly.

Thus quite utterly denied any nourishing Cornelia-flavored food for his thoughts, his hungry mind reverted very naturally to the tantalizing, evasive, sweetly spicy fragrance of the 'Molly'

episode--before the really dreadful photograph of the unhappy spinster-lady had burst upon his blinking vision.

Scowlingly he picked up the picture and stared and stared at it.

Certainly it was grim. But even from its grimness emanated the same faint, mysterious odor of cinnamon roses that lurked in the accompanying letter. "There's some dreadful mistake somewhere," he insisted. Then suddenly he began to laugh, and reaching out once more for pen and paper, inscribed his second letter and his first complaint to the Serial-Letter Co.

"To the Serial-Letter Co.," he wrote sternly, with many ferocious tremors of dignity and rheumatism.

"Kindly allow me to call attention to the fact that in my recent order of the 18th inst., the specifications distinctly stated 'love-letters', and _not_ any correspondence whatsoever,--no matter how exhilarating from either a 'Gray-Plush Squirrel' or a 'Banda Sea Pirate' as evidenced by enclosed photograph which I am hereby returning. Please refund money at once or forward me without delay a consistent photograph of a 'special edition de luxe' girl.

"Very truly yours."

The letter was mailed by the janitor long before noon. Even as late as eleven o'clock that night Stanton was still hopefully expecting an answer. Nor was he altogether disappointed. Just before midnight a messenger boy appeared with a fair-sized manilla envelope, quite stiff and important looking.

"Oh, please, Sir," said the enclosed letter, "Oh, please, Sir, we cannot refund your subscription money because--we have spent it. But if you will only be patient, we feel quite certain that you will be altogether satisfied in the long run with the material offered you. As for the photograph recently forwarded to you, kindly accept our apologies for a very clumsy mistake made here in the office.

Do any of these other types suit you better? Kindly mark selection and return all pictures at your earliest convenience."

Before the messenger boy's astonished interest Stanton spread out on the bed all around him a dozen soft sepia-colored photographs of a dozen different girls. Stately in satin, or simple in gingham, or deliciously hoydenish in fishing-clothes, they challenged his surprised attention. Blonde, brunette, tall, short, posing with wistful tenderness in the flickering glow of an open fire, or smiling frankly out of a purely conventional vignette--they one and all defied him to choose between them.

"Oh! Oh!" laughed Stanton to himself. "Am I to try and separate her picture from eleven pictures of her friends! So that's the game, is it? Well, I guess not! Does she think I'm going to risk choosing a tom-boy girl if the gentle little creature with the pansies is really herself? Or suppose she truly is the enchanting little tom-boy, would she probably write me any more nice funny letters if I solemnly selected her sentimental, moony-looking friend at the heavily draped window?"

Craftily he returned all the pictures unmarked to the envelope, and changing the address hurried the messenger boy off to remail it. Just this little note, hastily scribbled in pencil went with the envelope:

"DEAR SERIAL-LETTER CO.: