er to this. She telegraphed
instead. The message even in the telegraph operator's handwriting
looked a little nervous.

"Do you mean that you are tired of it?" she asked quite boldly.

With miserable perplexity Stanton wired back. "No, I couldn't exactly
say that I was tired of it."

Cornelia's answer to that was fluttering in his hands within twelve
hours.

"Do you mean that there is someone else?" The words fairly ticked
themselves off the yellow page.

It was twenty-four hours before Stanton made up his mind just what to
reply. Then, "No, I couldn't exactly say there is anybody else," he
confessed wretchedly.

Cornelia's mother answered this time. The telegram fairly rustled with
sarcasm. "You don't seem to be very sure about anything," said
Cornelia's mother.

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.

[Illustration: Cornelia's mother answered this time]

"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 bol