"What do you say to 'jolly Molly'?" her brother, on this, took leave to ask, putting the question to Ralph with an unexpected friendly candour. "If you had heard her named that way wouldn't it have made you want to know her? But perhaps it was the way, and that it was so you were taken captive. Of course I don't know, in spite of what they say," he went on, "what has shaken us so together." "It must have been that he had heard of you as merry Perry!" the girl at once retorted; upon which Mrs. Midmore as promptly remarked that she had never in her life listened to so much nonsense. "One would really think," she continued to Ralph, "that such things as letters had never passed between us, and that it's a mistake or a mystery that Molly herself, from a year ago, wrote to you under my approval." "He wrote to me under my own," Molly said, while her bold eyes, all provoking indulgence, suggested to him again in that connection more matters than any he immediately grasped. But he felt he must try to grasp, having somehow got so ridiculously off and away. Of course he would have written to her, of course he _must_ and with the lapse of another moment he had expressed this for his relief--making the point to extravagance in fact, in order to make it at all. "I wrote you three to your one, you know--which I dare say _you_ will have noticed," he observed to her mother, "since I hope she was always pleased enough." "I grant you, cousin," Perry interposed, "that there has gone on here for months past such a sight of writing and reading as would have done credit to a lawyer's office. I congratulate you and congratulate _them_ on what it seems to have meant." He had spoken in franker accommodation than had yet come from him, and now walked away to the window, where, looking out, he drew a deep breath again; Ralph remaining struck with his odd alternations, those, as who should say, of a man who could lose his ease and fail of his balance and then once more recover them--which was in fact very much what was happening to our friend himself. "I suppose you've kept my letters, every one of which I remember, as I've kept yours," Molly resumed in her great gaiety--"so that I can bring them down to you tied up with pink ribbons, and then, if we compare, we'll see who wrote oftenest; though of course I quite allow," she smiled, "who wrote best." Ralph met afresh on this one of his needs to consider. "You have 'em tied up with pink ribbon?" "You mean," Molly asked "that you've tied up mine with blue? Or that you've tied up mother's with black?" He was conscious, once more, that the truth of this would come to him--but meanwhile, just for the instant, he wondered and waited. "You've really got mine to show me?" "In return for your showing me mine; which--look at him, look at him!" she said to her mother--"I don't half believe you've kept."