"W-h-e-w!" growled Stanton, "I'll hardly stand for that statement."

"Well, then lie down for it," taunted the Doctor. "Keep right on being sick and worried and--." Peremptorily he reached out both hands towards the box. "Here!" he insisted. "Let's dump the whole mischievous nonsense into the fire and burn it up!"

With an "Ouch," of pain Stanton knocked the Doctor's hands away. "Burn up my letters?" he laughed. "Well, I guess not! I wouldn't even burn up the wall papers. I've had altogether too much fun out of them. And as for the books, the Browning, etc.--why hang it all, I've gotten awfully fond of those books!" Idly he picked up the South American volume and opened the fly-leaf for the Doctor to see. "Carl from his Molly," it said quite distinctly.

"Oh, yes," mumbled the Doctor. "It looks very pleasant. There's absolutely no denying that it looks very pleasant. And some day--out of an old trunk, or tucked down behind your library encyclopedias--your wife will discover the book and ask blandly, 'Who was Molly? I don't remember your ever saying anything about a "Molly".--Just someone you used to know?' And your answer will be innocent enough: 'No, dear, _someone whom I never knew_!' But how about the pucker along your spine, and the awfully foolish, grinny feeling around your cheek-bones? And on the street and in the cars and at the theaters you'll always and forever be looking and searching, and asking yourself, 'Is it by any chance possible that this girl sitting next to me now--?' And your wife will keep saying, with just a barely perceptible edge in her voice, 'Carl, do you know that red-haired girl whom we just pa.s.sed?

You stared at her so!' And you'll say, 'Oh, no! I was merely wondering if--' Oh yes, you'll always and forever be 'wondering if'. And mark my words, Stanton, people who go about the world with even the most innocent chronic question in their eyes, are pretty apt to run up against an unfortunately large number of wrong answers."

"But you take it all so horribly seriously," protested Stanton. "Why you rave and rant about it as though it was actually my affections that were involved!"

"Your affections?" cried the Doctor in great exasperation. "Your affections? Why, man, if it was only your affections, do you suppose I'd be wasting even so much as half a minute's worry on you? But it's your _imagination_ that's involved. That's where the blooming mischief lies.

Affection is all right. Affection is nothing but a nice, safe flame that feeds only on one special kind of fuel,--its own particular object.

You've got an 'affection' for Cornelia, and wherever Cornelia fails to feed that affection it is mercifully ordained that the starved flame shall go out into cold gray ashes without making any further trouble whatsoever. But you've got an 'imagination' for this make-believe girl--heaven help you!--and an 'imagination' is a great, wild, seething, insatiate tongue of fire that, thwarted once and for all in its original desire to gorge itself with realities, will turn upon you body and soul, and lick up your crackling fancy like so much kindling wood--and sear your common sense, and scorch your young wife's happiness. Nothing but Cornelia herself will ever make you want--Cornelia. But the other girl, the unknown girl--why she's the face in the clouds, she's the voice in the sea; she's the glow of the sunset; she's the hush of the June twilight! Every summer breeze, every winter gale, will fan the embers!

Every thumping, twittering, tw.a.n.ging pulse of an orchestra, every--. Oh, Stanton, I say, it isn't the ghost of the things that are dead that will ever come between you and Cornelia. There never yet was the ghost of any lost thing that couldn't be tamed into a purring household pet.

But--the--ghost--of--a--thing--that--you've--never--yet--found? _That_, I tell you, is a very different matter!"

Pounding at his heart, and blazing in his cheeks, the insidious argument, the subtle justification, that had been teeming in Stanton's veins all the week, burst suddenly into speech.

"But I gave Cornelia the _chance_ to be 'all the world' to me," he protested doggedly, "and she didn't seem to care a hang about it!

Great Scott, man! Are you going to call a fellow unfaithful because he hikes off into a corner now and then and reads a bit of Browning, for instance, all to himself--or wanders out on the piazza some night all sole alone to stare at the stars that happen to bore his wife to extinction?"

"But you'll never be able to read Browning again 'all by yourself',"

taunted the Doctor. "Whether you buy it fresh from the presses or borrow it stale and old from a public library, you'll never find another copy as long as you live that doesn't smell of cinnamon roses.

And as to 'star-gazing' or any other weird thing that your wife doesn't care for--you'll never go out alone any more into dawns or darknesses without the very tingling conscious presence of a wonder whether the 'other girl' _would_ have cared for it!"

"Oh, shucks!" said Stanton. Then, suddenly his forehead puckered up.

"Of course I've got a worry," he acknowledged frankly. "Any fellow's got a worry who finds himself engaged to be married to a girl who isn't keen enough about it to want to be all the world to him. But I don't know that even the most worried fellow has any real cause to be scared, as long as the girl in question still remains the only flesh-and-blood girl on the face of the earth whom he wishes _did_ like him well enough to want to be 'all the world' to him."

"The only 'flesh-and-blood' girl?" scoffed the Doctor. "Oh, you're all right, Stanton. I like you and all that. But I'm mighty glad just the same that it isn't my daughter whom you're going to marry, with all this 'Molly Make-Believe' nonsense lurking in the background. Cut it out, Stanton, I say. Cut it out!"

"Cut it out?" mused Stanton somewhat distrait. "Cut it out? What!

Molly Make-Believe?"

Under the quick jerk of his knees the big box of letters and papers and things brimmed over in rustling froth across the whole surface of the table. Just for a second the muscles in his throat tightened a trifle. Then, suddenly he burst out laughing--wildly, uproariously, like an excited boy.

"Cut it out?" he cried. "But it's such a joke! Can't you see that it's nothing in the world except a perfectly delicious, perfectly intangible joke?"

"U--m--m," reiterated the Doctor.

In the very midst of his reiteration, there came a sharp rap at the door, and in answer to Stanton's cheerful permission to enter, the so-called "delicious, intangible joke" manifested itself abruptly in the person of a rather small feminine figure very heavily m.u.f.fled up in a great black cloak, and a rose-colored veil that shrouded her nose and chin bluntly like the nose and chin of a face only half hewed out as yet from a block of pink granite.

"It's only Molly," explained an undeniably sweet little alto voice.

"Am I interrupting you?"

VII

Jumping to his feet, the Doctor stood staring wildly from Stanton's amazed face to the perfectly calm, perfectly accustomed air of poise that characterized every movement of the pink-shrouded visitor. The amazement in fact never wavered for a second from Stanton's blush-red visage, nor the supreme serenity from the lady's whole att.i.tude. But across the Doctor's startled features a fearful, outraged consciousness of having been deceived, warred mightily with a consciousness of unutterable mirth.

Advancing toward the fireplace with a rather slow-footed, hesitating gait, the little visitor's attention focused suddenly on the cluttered table and she cried out with unmistakable delight. "Why, what are you people doing with all my letters and things?"

Then climbing up on the st.u.r.dy bra.s.s fender, she thrust her pink, impenetrable features right into the scared, pallid face of the shabby old clock and announced pointedly, "It's almost half-past seven. And I can stay till just eight o'clock!"

When she turned around again the Doctor was gone.

With a tiny shrug of her shoulders, she settled herself down then in a big, high-backed chair before the fire and stretched out her overshoed toes to the shining edge of the fender. As far as any apparent self-consciousness was concerned, she might just as well have been all alone in the room.

Convulsed with amus.e.m.e.nt, yet almost paralyzed by a certain stubborn, dumb sort of embarra.s.sment, nothing on earth could have forced Stanton into making even an indefinite speech to the girl until she had made at least one perfectly definite and reasonably illuminating sort of speech to him. Biting his grinning lips into as straight a line as possible, he gathered up the scattered pages of the evening paper and attacked them furiously with scowling eyes.

After a really dreadful interim of silence, the mysterious little visitor rose in a gloomy, discouraged kind of way, and climbing up again on the narrow bra.s.s fender, peered once more into the face of the clock.

"It's twenty minutes of eight, now," she announced. Into her voice crept for the first time the faintest perceptible suggestion of a tremor. "It's twenty minutes of eight--now--and I've got to leave here exactly at eight. Twenty minutes is a rather--a rather stingy little bit out of a whole--lifetime," she added falteringly.

Then, and then only did Stanton's nervousness break forth suddenly into one wild, uproarious laugh that seemed to light up the whole dark, ominous room as though the gray, sulky, smoldering hearth-fire itself had exploded into iridescent flame. Chasing close behind the musical contagion of his deep guffaws followed the softer, gentler giggle of the dainty pink-veiled lady.

By the time they had both finished laughing it was fully quarter of eight.

"But you see it was just this way," explained the pleasant little voice--all alto notes again. Cautiously a slim, unringed hand burrowed out from the somber folds of the big cloak, and raised the pink mouth-mumbling veil as much as half an inch above the red-lipped speech line. "You see it was just this way. You paid me a lot of money--all in advance--for a six weeks' special edition de luxe Love-Letter Serial.

And I spent your money the day I got it; and worse than that I owed it--long before I even got it! And worst of all, I've got a chance now to go home to-morrow for all the rest of the winter. No, I don't mean that exactly. I mean I've found a chance to go up to Vermont and have all my expenses paid--just for reading aloud every day to a lady who isn't so awfully deaf. But you see I still owe you a week's subscription--and I can't refund you the money because I haven't got it.

And it happens that I can't run a fancy love-letter business from the special house that I'm going to. There aren't enough resources there--and all that. So I thought that perhaps--perhaps--considering how much you've been teasing and teasing to know who I was--I thought that perhaps if I came here this evening and let you really see me--that maybe, you know--maybe, not positively, but just _maybe_--you'd be willing to call that equivalent to one week's subscription. _Would you?_"

In the sharp eagerness of her question she turned her shrouded face full-view to Stanton's curious gaze, and he saw the little nervous, mischievous twitch of her lips at the edge of her masking pink veil resolve itself suddenly into a whimper of real pain. Yet so vivid were the lips, so blissfully, youthfully, lusciously carmine, that every single, individual statement she made seemed only like a festive little announcement printed in red ink.

"I guess I'm not a very--good business manager," faltered the red-lipped voice with incongruous pathos. "Indeed I know I'm not because--well because--the Serial-Letter Co. has 'gone broke!

Bankrupt', is it, that you really say?"

With a little mockingly playful imitation of a stride she walked the first two fingers of her right hand across the surface of the table to Stanton's discarded supper dishes.

"Oh, please may I have that piece of cold toast?" she asked plaintively. No professional actress on the stage could have spoken the words more deliciously. Even to the actual crunching of the toast in her little shining white teeth, she sought to ill.u.s.trate as fantastically as possible the ultimate misery of a bankrupt person starving for cold toast.

Stanton's spontaneous laughter attested his full appreciation of her mimicry.

"But I tell you the Serial-Letter Co. _has_ 'gone broke'!" she persisted a trifle wistfully. "I guess--I guess it takes a man to really run a business with any sort of financial success, 'cause you see a man never puts anything except his head into his business. And of course if you only put your head into it, then you go right along giving always just a little wee bit less than 'value received'--and so you can't help, sir, making a profit. Why people would think you were plain, stark crazy if you gave them even one more pair of poor rubber boots than they'd paid for. But a woman! Well, you see my little business was a sort of a scheme to sell sympathy--perfectly good sympathy, you know--but to sell it to people who really needed it, instead of giving it away to people who didn't care anything about it at all. And you have to run that sort of business almost entirely with your heart--and you wouldn't feel decent at all, unless you delivered to everybody just a little tiny bit more sympathy than he paid for.

Otherwise, you see you wouldn't be delivering perfectly good sympathy.

So that's why--you understand now--that's why I had to send you my very own woolly blanket-wrapper, and my very own silver porringer, and my very own sling-shot that I fight city cats with,--because, you see, I had to use every single cent of your money right away to pay for the things that I'd already bought for other people."

"For other people?" quizzed Stanton a bit resentfully.

"Oh, yes," acknowledged the girl; "for several other people." Then, "Did you like the idea of the 'Rheumatic Nights Entertainment'?" she asked quite abruptly.

"Did I like it?" cried Stanton. "Did I _like_ it?"

With a little shrugging air of apology the girl straightened up very stiffly in her chair.

"Of course it wasn't exactly an original idea," she explained contritely. "That is, I mean not original for you. You see, it's really a little club of mine--a little subscription club of rheumatic people who can't sleep; and I go every night in the week, an hour to each one of them. There are only three, you know. There's a youngish lady in Boston, and a very, very old gentleman out in Brookline, and the tiniest sort of a poor little sick girl in Cambridge. Sometimes I turn up just at supper-time and jolly them along a bit with their gruels. Sometimes I don't get around till ten or eleven o'clock in the great boo-black dark. From two to three in the morning seems to be the cruelest, grayest, coldest time for the little girl in Cambridge....