Molly Make-Believe | Page 5

takes two whole seasons to raise a blanket-wrapper, so please be awfully much delighted with it. And oh, Mr. Sick Boy, when you look at the funny, blurry colors, couldn't you just please pretend that the tinge of green is the flavor of pleasant pastures, and that the streak of red is the Cardinal Flower that blazed along the edge of the noisy brook?
"Goodby till to-morrow,
"MOLLY."
With a face so altogether crowded with astonishment that there was no room left in it for pain, Stanton's lame fingers reached out inquisitively and patted the warm, woolly fabric.
"Nice old Lamb--y" he acknowledged judicially.
Then suddenly around the corners of his under lip a little balky smile began to flicker.
"Of course I'll save the letter for Cornelia," he protested, "but no one could really expect me to paste such a scrumptious blanket-wrapper into a scrap-book."
Laboriously wriggling his thinness and his coldness into the black sheep's luxuriant, irresponsible fleece, a bulging side-pocket in the wrapper bruised his hip. Reaching down very temperishly to the pocket he drew forth a small lace-trimmed handkerchief knotted pudgily across a brimming handful of fir-balsam needles. Like a scorching hot August breeze the magic, woodsy fragrance crinkled through his nostrils.
"These people certainly know how to play the game all right," he reasoned whimsically, noting even the consistent little letter "M" embroidered in one corner of the handkerchief.
Then, because he was really very sick and really very tired, he snuggled down into the new blessed warmth and turned his gaunt cheek to the pillow and cupped his hand for sleep like a drowsy child with its nose and mouth burrowed eagerly down into the expectant draught. But the cup did not fill.--Yet scented deep in his curved, empty, balsam-scented fingers lurked--somehow--somewhere--the dregs of a wonderful dream: Boyhood, with the hot, sweet flutter of summer woods, and the pillowing warmth of the soft, sunbaked earth, and the crackle of a twig, and the call of a bird, and the drone of a bee, and the great blue, blue mystery of the sky glinting down through a green-latticed canopy overhead.
For the first time in a whole, cruel tortuous week he actually smiled his way into his morning nap.
When he woke again both the sun and the Doctor were staring pleasantly into his face.
"You look better!" said the Doctor. "And more than that you don't look half so 'cussed cross'."
"Sure," grinned Stanton, with all the deceptive, undauntable optimism of the Just-Awakened.
"Nevertheless," continued the Doctor more soberly, "there ought to be somebody a trifle more interested in you than the janitor to look after your food and your medicine and all that. I'm going to send you a nurse."
"Oh, no!" gasped Stanton. "I don't need one! And frankly--I can't afford one." Shy as a girl, his eyes eluded the doctor's frank stare. "You see," he explained diffidently; "you see, I'm just engaged to be married--and though business is fairly good and all that--my being away from the office six or eight weeks is going to cut like the deuce into my commissions--and roses cost such a horrid price last Fall--and there seems to be a game law on diamonds this year; they practically fine you for buying them, and--"
The Doctor's face brightened irrelevantly. "Is she a Boston young lady?" he queried.
"Oh, yes," beamed Stanton.
"Good!" said the Doctor. "Then of course she can keep some sort of an eye on you. I'd like to see her. I'd like to talk with her--give her just a few general directions as it were."
A flush deeper than any mere love-embarrassment spread suddenly over Stanton's face.
"She isn't here," he acknowledged with barely analyzable mortification. "She's just gone south."
"Just gone south?" repeated the Doctor. "You don't mean--since you've been sick?"
Stanton nodded with a rather wobbly grin, and the Doctor changed the subject abruptly, and busied himself quickly with the least bad-tasting medicine that he could concoct.
Then left alone once more with a short breakfast and a long morning, Stanton sank back gradually into a depression infinitely deeper than his pillows, in which he seemed to realize with bitter contrition that in some strange, unintentional manner his purely innocent, matter-of-fact statement that Cornelia "had just gone south" had assumed the gigantic disloyalty of a public proclamation that the lady of his choice was not quite up to the accepted standard of feminine intelligence or affections, though to save his life he could not recall any single glum word or gloomy gesture that could possibly have conveyed any such erroneous impression to the Doctor.
[Illustration: Every girl like Cornelia had to go South sometime between November and March]
"Why Cornelia had to go South," he reasoned conscientiously. "Every girl like Cornelia had to go South sometime between November and March. How could any mere man even hope to keep rare, choice, exquisite creatures like that cooped