XXIVThey were still there when I went back and closed the door, Archie still holding her tight, and talking to her in words that were pretty silly, I suppose, but that had all the tender balm of Gilead in them. And at some point it must have quit being brotherly, because when they came downstairs and Molly rushed to her mother’s arms her eyes were flecked with gold as burnished as her hair, and she was a starlit girl, as radiant as the sun that was shining now on the Silver Moon roses on the garden wall.
They were considerably improved too, when I saw them, because Archie’d shaved and Molly was dry, in one of Ginny Dolan’s blue dresses, her donkey’s-tail groomed in proper place again. They hadn’t even seen my sodden walls. But Mrs. Dolan’s daughter had, I tell you. She was down on her kne
