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, and I felt I was safe at last. I raised my hand and pressed it against John's wet lashes until he could let me speak, and I was melted into his very breast itself. "Molly," he said, when enough tenderness had come back into his arms to let me breathe, "you have almost killed me!" "You!" I exclaimed, crowding still closer, or at least trying to. "It's not _you_; it's I that am killed, and you did it! I know you don't really want me, but I can't help that. I'd rather you do the suffering with me than to do it myself away from you. I'm so hungry and thirsty for you that--that I can't diet any longer!". I put the case the strongest way I knew how. "Want you, Molly?" he almost sobbed, and I felt his heart pounding hard next to my shoulder.