"Yes, want me!" I answered with more spirit than breath left in me. "I refuse to believe you are as stupid as I am, and anybody with even an ordinary amount of brains must have seen how hard I was fighting for you. I feel sure I left no stone unturned. Some of them I can already think back and see myself tugging at, and it makes me hot all over. I'm foolish and always was, so I'm to be excused for acting that awful way, but you are to blame for _letting_ me do it. I'm going to be your punishment for life for not having been stern and stopped me. You had better stop me, for if I go on loving you as I have been for the last few minutes it will make you uncomfortable." "Blossom," he said, after he had hushed me with another broken dose of love, as large as he thought I could stand--I could have stood more!--"I am never going to tell you how long I have loved you, but that day you came to me all in a flutter with Bennett's letter in your hand it is going to take you a lifetime to settle for. You were mine--and Bill's! How _could_ you--but women don't understand!" I felt him shudder in my arms as I held him close. "Don't women know, John?" I managed to ask softly in memory of a like question he had put to me across that bread and jam with the rose a-listening from the dark. What brought me to consciousness was his fumbling with the lace on that blue muslin relict of a sentiment. The lace had got caught on his sleeve buttons. "Please don't forget that that is his possession," I laughed under his chin. "I'm still scared to death of him, and you haven't hid me yet!" "Molly," he asked, this time with a heaven-laugh, "where could you be more effectually hid from Alfred Bennett than in my arms?" I spent ten minutes telling Billy what a hippopotamus really looks like as I put him to bed, but later, much as I should have liked to, I couldn't consume that horrible dinner, that I had helped prepare at the Johnsons', in the shelter of John's arms, and I had to face Alfred. Ruth Clinton was there, and she faced him too. A man that can't be happy with a woman who is willing to "fulfil his destiny" doesn't deserve to be. Then we came over here, and John had the most beautiful time persuading Aunt Adeline how a good man like Mr. Carter would want his young widow to be taken care of by being married to a safe friend of his instead of being flighty and having folks wondering whom she would marry. "You know yourself how hard a time a beautiful young widow has, Mrs. Henderson," he said in the tone of voice that always makes his patients glad to take his worst doses. He got his blessing and me--with a warning.