Cornelia's mother answered this time
Somehow these words brought the first cheerful smile to his lips.
"No, you're quite right. I'm not at all sure about anything," he wired almost gleefully in return, wiping his pen with delicious joy on the edge of the clean white bed-spread.
Then because it is really very dangerous for over-wrought people to try to make any noise like laughter, a great choking, bitter sob caught him up suddenly, and sent his face burrowing down like a night-scared child into the safe, soft, feathery depths of his pillow—where, with his knuckles ground so hard into his eyes that all his tears were turned to stars, there came to him very, very slowly, so slowly in fact that it did not alarm him at all, the strange, electrifying vision of the one fact on earth that he was sure of: a little keen, luminous, brown-eyed face with a look in it, and a look for him only—so help him God!—such as he had never seen on the face of any other woman since the world was made. Was it possible?—was it really possible? Suddenly his whole heart seemed to irradiate light and color and music and sweet smelling things.
"Oh, Molly, Molly, Molly!" he shouted. "I want you! I want you!"
In the strange, lonesome days that followed, neither burly flesh-and-blood Doctor nor slim paper sweetheart tramped noisily over the threshold or slid thuddingly through the letter-slide.
No one apparently was ever coming to see Stanton again unless actually compelled to do so. Even the laundryman seemed to have skipped his usual day; and twice in succession the morning paper had most annoyingly failed to appear. Certainly neither the boldest private inquiry nor the most delicately worded public advertisement had proved able to discover the whereabouts of "Molly Make-Believe," much less succeeded in bringing her back. But the Doctor, at least, could be summoned by ordinary telephone, and Cornelia and her mother would surely be moving North eventually, whether Stanton's last message hastened their movements or not.
In subsequent experience it seemed to take two telephone messages to produce the Doctor. A trifle coolly, a trifle distantly, more than a trifle disapprovingly, he appeared at last and stared dully at Stanton's astonishing booted-and-coated progress towards health.