Big and bland and blond and beautiful, Cornelia's physical personality loomed up suddenly in his memory-so big, in fact, so bland, so blond, so splendidly beautiful, that he realized abruptly with a strange little tucked feeling in his heart that the question of Cornelia's "brains" had never yet occurred to him. Pushing the thought impatiently aside he sank back luxuriantly again into his pillows, and grinned without any perceptible effort at all as he planned adroitly how he would paste the Serial Love Letters one by one into the gaudiest looking scrap-book that he could find and present it to Cornelia on her birthday as a text-book for the "newly engaged" girl. And he hoped and prayed with all his heart that every individual letter would be printed with crimson ink on a violet-scented page and would fairly reek from date to signature with all the joyous, ecstatic silliness that graces either an old-fashioned novel or a modern breach-of-promise suit.
So, quite worn out at last with all this unwonted excitement, he drowsed off to sleep for as long as ten minutes and dreamed that he was a-bigamist.
The next day and the next night were stale and mean and musty with a drizzling winter rain. But the following morning crashed inconsiderately into the world's limp face like a snowball spiked with icicles. Gasping for breath and crunching for foothold the sidewalk people breasted the gritty cold. Puckered with chills and goose-flesh, the fireside people huddled and sneezed around their respective hearths. Shivering like the ague between his cotton-flannel blankets, Stanton's courage fairly raced the mercury in its downward course. By noon his teeth were chattering like a mouthful of cracked ice. By night the sob in his thirsty throat was like a lump of salt and snow. But nothing outdoors or in, from morning till night, was half as wretchedly cold and clammy as the rapidly congealing hot-water bottle that slopped and gurgled between his aching shoulders.
It was just after supper when a messenger boy blurted in from the frigid hall with a great gust of cold and a long pasteboard box and a letter.
Frowning with perplexity Stanton's clumsy fingers finally dislodged from the box a big, soft blanket-wrapper with an astonishingly strange, blurry pattern of green and red against a somber background of rusty black. With increasing amazement he picked up the accompanying letter and scanned it hastily.
"Dear Lad," the letter began quite intimately. But it was not signed "Cornelia". It was signed "Molly"!
II
Turning nervously back to the box's wrapping-paper Stanton read once more the perfectly plain, perfectly unmistakable name and address,-his own, repeated in absolute duplicate on the envelope. Quicker than his mental comprehension mere physical embarrassment began to flush across his cheek-bones. Then suddenly the whole truth dawned on him: The first installment of his Serial-Love-Letter had arrived.
"But I thought-thought it would be type-written," he stammered miserably to himself. "I thought it would be a-be a-hectographed kind of a thing. Why, hang it all, it's a real letter! And when I doubled my check and called for a special edition de luxe-I wasn't sitting up on my hind legs begging for real presents!"
But "Dear Lad" persisted the pleasant, round, almost childish handwriting:
"DEAR LAD,
"I could have cried yesterday when I got your letter
telling me how sick you were. Yes!-But crying wouldn't
'comfy' you any, would it? So just to send you
right-off-quick something to prove that I'm thinking of you,
here's a great, rollicking woolly wrapper to keep you snug
and warm this very night. I wonder if it would interest you
any at all to know that it is made out of a most larksome
Outlaw up on my grandfather's sweet-meadowed farm,-a
really, truly Black Sheep that I've raised all my own
sweaters and mittens on for the past five years. Only it
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.