"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'd 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 and got a swooning, maddening, luscious result.
"Want you, Molly?" he almost sobbed, and I felt his heart pounding hard next to my shoulder.
"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 some now anyway, for if I go on loving you as I have been for the last few minutes it will make you uncomfortable."
"Peaches," 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 Al 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. I was repaid for all those tiresome exercises I had taken by the strength to crush him against my breast almost as hard as he crushed me. Our combined strength was terrific, dangerous to life and ribs, but—heavenly!
"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 buttons at the waist of that blue muslin relict of a sentiment. I had fastened but one, and the lace had got caught on his sleeve buttons.
"Please don't button me into 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 Al 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 Chester was there, and she faced him too.