Andy undoubled himself with alacrity and sprang from the sleepy-hollow chair. His stern face was softened and filled with a boyish eagerness.

“Oh, Nance! Can’t you forgive me?”

“Excuse me, Dr. McLean, I did not know you were still here,” and Nance turned to leave the room.

Andy with long strides reached the door first and with his back against it held out beseeching hands.

“Yes, I’m here and am going to stay here——”

“Well, I am not! Please let me pass.” Nance was filled with a righteous indignation against Molly at having played this trick on her.

“But, my dear, I must tell you what a fool I have been——”

“That is not necessary. I know.”

Andy laughed. Nance had a laconic way of putting things that always tickled his humor.

“Now you sound like yourself, honey, but oh, please act like yourself! The real Nance Oldham could not be so cruel as to go off without letting me explain—I have no excuse—there could be none for my blind rage and jealousy—none unless loving you too hard could be called one. Will you listen to me?”

“I shall have to unless I stop up my ears, since you stop up the doorway.” Nance was very pale and trembling. Two years of suffering could not be done away with in a moment and the girl had surely suffered.

“Couldn’t we sit down and let me tell you?”

“We could!”

Andy eagerly directed Nance to the sofa, but she sedately seated herself in a small isolated sewing rocker. Andy accepted the amendment and placed his chair as near to hers as the frigid atmosphere around her permitted.

“Before I explain I must apologize. I would have done it the very day after that awful row we had, the very moment after it, if I had not thought you hated me.”

“And now?”

“And now I am going to apologize and explain, whether you hate me or not. I could do it lots better if you would let me hold your hand while I am doing it,” but Nance drew Molly’s knitting from a bag hung on the back of the chair and declared her hands were otherwise occupied. Molly had reached the purling end of a sleeveless sweater and no doubt would be glad of Nance’s expert assistance.

“Nance, there never has been any other woman in my life but you, you and my mother. You know perfectly well from the time I met you, when I was at Exmoor College and you were here at Wellington, that you were the only girl in the world for me. I had a kind of notion in my fool brain that I was going to be the only man in the world for you. When we were engaged I thought I was, but when I realized that Dr. Flint was paying you such devoted attention, at your home constantly——”

“My father’s physician!”

“Yes, I know,—but, honey, you see you were way up there in Vermont and I was down in New York and I was hungry for you all the time, and when your father died I thought you would pick right up and come to me—I knew nothing of your mother’s determination to stay with you—nothing of her illness—nothing but that you were staying in the same town with Flint and I must go back to New York. You did not tell me.”

“Well, hardly, after the way you raged and tore! I felt if you could rage that way we had better separate.”

“But, my dear, I’ll never rage that way again—I’ve learned my lesson. Can’t you forgive me?” Nance was silent.

“I love you just as much as I always did,—more, in fact. When little Mildred Green told me you had let her fall in the water because you were so busy with your husband, I wanted to die that minute. Of course I thought it was Flint. How could I know the child was playing a game with you? Nance, do you hate me as much as you did that terrible day two years ago?”

“Yes!” Nance’s answer was very low but Andy heard it.

“Well, then, there is no use in saying any more,” he sprang to his feet, his face grey with misery.

“I didn’t hate you then at all—nor do I now.”

“Oh, Nance, don’t tease me! Can you forgive me?” and poor Andy sank on his knees and bowed his head on her knees.

Nance’s arms were around him in a moment. She hugged his sandy head to her bosom with one hand and patted his back with the other while he gave a great sob.

“Andy McLean, you are still wringing wet. Get up from here this minute and take off that coat and let me dry it! And your shirt is damp, too! My, what a boy! Here, sit right close to the fire and dry that wet sleeve.”

Andy meekly submitted in a daze. Nance’s motherly attitude and sudden melting were too much for him. The coat was hung by the fire to dry while the young doctor stood helplessly by in his shirt sleeves.

“And now, Andy, I’m going to apologize to you and ask you to forgive me,” declared Nance, stoutly trying to go on with her knitting.

But Andy firmly took it from her and possessed himself of those busy hands.

“I was worse than you—when you said those hard things to me they hurt like fury—you didn’t know how they did hurt, but I did, and I should not have done the same thing to you. I said worse things to you than you did to me,—at least I tried to.”

“You did pretty well,” said Andy whimsically, pressing one of the imprisoned hands to his lips.

“Dr. Flint did want to marry me; I guess he still does, but—but——”

“But what, lassie?” Sometimes Andy dropped into his parents’ vernacular.

“I am not going to tell a man in his shirt sleeves why I didn’t marry Dr. Flint,” said Nance firmly. “It is too unpicturesque.”

“Then I’ll put on my coat.”

“No, you won’t! I wouldn’t tell a man in a wet coat, either.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t like to lay my brown head on a damp shoulder. Why don’t you do as I told you and dry that shirt sleeve? Hold it close to the fire, sir!”

“I won’t do it unless you tell me why you didn’t marry Dr. Flint.”

“Well, then, to keep you from catching your death of cold, I will tell you, but remember I have saved your life. It was—it was because—because he didn’t have sandy hair and a bad temper,” and Nance was enfolded in the despised shirt sleeves and found a very nice dry spot on which to lay her brown head.

The sun had set and twilight was upon them. The front door opened to admit the master of the house, but Molly was in ambush ready to catch him to keep him out of the library. Kizzie had started in to mend the fire but Molly stopped her.

“Never mind the fire, Kizzie. It is all right for such a warm evening. Give us tea in the den.”

“Why all of this mystery?” asked Edwin Green as he followed his wife back to the den, going on tiptoe as she demanded.

“Andy and Nance are in there.”

“Andy McLean! Fine! I want to see him. Won’t he be here to tea? I’ll go in and speak to him.”

“You’ll do no such thing! Edwin Green, you may be—in fact, are, a grand lecturer on English, but you have no practical sense. Don’t you know you might break in just at the wrong moment and Andy may get off to France without their making it up?”

“Making up what? Who making up: the Allies and the central powers?”

“Oh, Edwin, you know I mean Nance and Andy!”

“What are they making up? If it is a row, let’s go help them.”

“Not a soul shall go in that room until they come out, unless it is over my dead body.”

“Well, well! I’d rather stay in this room with your live body than go in there over your dead one,” and the professor pulled his wife down on the sofa by him, “especially if you will give me some tea,” as Kizzie came in grinning with the tea tray.

“They’s co’tin’ a-goin’ on in yander, boss. The fiah is low an’ the lights ain’t lit, but Miss Molly she guard that do’ like a cat do a mouse hole. Cose Miss Nance ain’t got no maw to futher things up for her but Miss Molly is all ready to fly off an’ git the preacher, seems like.”

“I can’t remember that things were made easy for me this way when I was addressing my wife,” complained Edwin as he stirred his tea with his arm around his wife, a combination that could not have been made had his arm not been long and Molly still slender.

“Ungrateful man! Why, Judy and Kent took the bus from Fontainebleau to Barbizon when they were simply dying to walk, just to give you a chance. Have you forgotten?”

“I haven’t forgotten the walk—I never will—and if they really rode on my account, I’ll pass on the favor to other lovers and stay out of my library until the cows come home; that is, if you will stay with me.”

Molly told him then of the whole affair and how Mildred had righted matters, telling Andy just exactly the right thing to bring him to his senses.

“I am almost sure they have made up and are engaged again,” sighed Molly ecstatically. A romance was dear to her soul and being happily married herself, she felt like furthering the love affairs of all her friends.

“They are either engaged or dead,” laughed Edwin. “Such silence emanating from the library must bode extreme calamity or extreme bliss. If it continues much longer I think it is my duty as a householder to break in the door and offer congratulations or call the coroner, as the case demands.”

“It is getting late. Maybe I had better go in and ask Andy to stay to dinner.”

Molly, who had a deep-rooted objection to noise and usually talked in a low tone, now spoke in a loud voice as she bumped her way along the hall, pushing chairs and rattling the hat rack and calling out shrilly to the amused husband following her. Strange to say, she could not remember on which side of the door the knob was, although she had lived several years in that house. She fumblingly hunted it and finally opened the door with a great rattle.

Nance was seated sedately knitting and Andy was holding his coat close to the dying flames. The room was almost dark.

“Kizzie should have lighted the lamp and attended to the fire,” Molly said briskly. Oh, Molly, how could you be so untruthful, blaming things on poor Kizzie, too? (Molly’s conscience did hurt her for dragging Kizzie in and she gave the girl a long coveted blue hat that she had meant to keep for second best, feeling that it might act as a salve on her own tender, truth-loving soul. Kizzie, quite ignorant of the cause for this generosity, gratefully accepted the hat and asked no questions.)

“Yes, it gets dark before one realizes,” said Nance demurely.

“Ahem!” from the professor.

“Oh, Andy, your coat is still wet! Mildred told me you wrapped it around her. I’ll get you Edwin’s smoking jacket and have your coat dried. You must stay to dinner with us. I can ’phone your mother not to expect you at home.”

Andy did not need much persuading, but accepted the invitation with alacrity. Molly called up Mrs. McLean to ask for the loan of her son for dinner.

“Yes!” exclaimed that wise lady at the other end of the wire. “I have been expecting a telephone call for the last half hour. You may keep him but I shall wait up to see him when he gets home. I am sur-r-e he’ll have something to tell me. From my back window I saw Nance with the perambulator full of babies on her way to the lake and I sent Andy off for a walk, first putting a flea in his ear by suggesting that the lake was getting shallower and shallower. He has always been that inquisitive that I was sur-r-e he would make for that spot to find out why. I knew that all those poor-r young folks had to do was to meet. Keep him, Molly—and God bless you!”

There was a little choking sound at the other end that Molly understood very well. She hung up the receiver “with a smile on her lip but a tear in her eye.” It is all very well for a mother to be unselfish and want her son to marry and to be happy, but there is a tug of war going on in her heart all the time.

“I know how I will feel when Dodo gets engaged,” Molly said to Edwin when she told him of what Mrs. McLean had said; but that young father went off into such shouts of laughter, Molly had a feeling that mere man could never understand a mother’s heart.