"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 muffled 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?"