“I would like to see that record now, Mrs. Molly.  It seems to me you are about as slim as you want to be.  How did you tip the scales last time you weighed, and have you noticed any trouble at all with your heart?”

“I weigh one hundred and thirty-four pounds and I’ve got to melt and freeze and starve off that four,” I answered, ignoring the heart question and also the question of producing this book.  Wonder what he would do if I gave it to him to read just as it is?

“How about the heart?” he persisted, and I may have imagined the smile in his eyes for his mouth was purely professional.  Anyway, I lowered my lashes down on to my cheeks and answered experimentally: 

“Sometimes it hurts.”  Then a cyclone happened to me.

“Come here to me a minute!” he said quickly and he turned me around and put his head down between my shoulders and held me so tight against his ear that I could hardly breathe.

“Expand your chest three times and breathe as deep as you can,” he ordered from against my back buttons.  I expanded and breathed—­pretty quickly at that.

[Illustration:  “Breathe as deep as you can”]

“Now hold your breath as long as you can,” he commanded, and it fitted my mood exactly to do so.

“Can’t find anything,” he said at last, letting me go and looking carefully at my face.  His eyes were all anxiety; and I liked it.  “When does it hurt you and how?” he asked anxiously.

“Moonlight nights and lonesomely,” I answered before I could stop myself, and what happened then was worse than any cyclone.  He got white for a minute and just looked at me as if I was a bug stuck on a pin, then gave a short little laugh and turned to the table.

“I didn’t understand you were joking,” he said quietly.

That maddened me and I would have done anything to make him think I was not the foolish thing he evidently had classified me as being.  I snatched at my mind and shook out a mixture of truth and lies that fooled even myself and gave them to him, looking straight in his face.  I would have cracked all the ten commandments to save myself from his contempt.

“I’m not joking,” I said jerkily; “I am lonesome.  And worse than being lonesome, I’m scared.  I ought to have stayed just the quiet relict of Mr. Carter and gone on to church meetings with Aunt Adeline and let myself be fat and respectable; but I haven’t got the character.  You thought I went to town to buy a monument, and I didn’t; I bought enough clothes for two brides, and now I’m scared to wear ’em, and I don’t know what you’ll think when you see my bank-book.  Everybody is talking about me and that dinner-party Tuesday night, and Aunt Adeline says she can’t live in a house of mourning so desecrated any longer; she’s going back to the cottage.  Aunt Bettie Pollard says that if I want to get married I ought to do it to Mr. Wilson Graves because of the seven children and then everybody would be so relieved that they are taken care of that they would forget that Mr. Carter hasn’t been dead quite one year yet.  Mrs. Johnson says I ought to be declared a minor and put as a ward to you.  I can’t help Judge Wade’s sending me flowers and Tom’s sitting on my front steps night and day.  I’m not strong enough to carry him away and murder him.  I am perfectly miserable and I’m—­”