Madge would be indoors, as it was raining, and it was too cold and uninviting for a bathe.
He spent the afternoon trudging about the muddy lanes with the doctor, but the evening found him desolate.
Ah, these sad days that form our characters, as men tell us—characters that, at times, we feel we could willingly dispense with, so that the days might be always sunny, and the horizons clear.
Even the longest of dreary days ends at last, however, and Tommy fell sorrowfully asleep in the summer house, a rain-drop rolling dismally down his freckled nose, and his mind held captive by troubled visions of school.
A day or two after Tommy's departure, the poet stooped, in a side path of his garden, to pick up a stray sheet of paper.
On it he saw two words in his own handwriting.
"Mollie—folly—"
He sighed.
"I remember," he said.
Then he looked again, for in a round, sprawling hand was written yet another word—"jolly."