“Now that’ll do, Molly, just hush for a half-minute and let me talk to you,” said Doctor John as he took my hand in his and drew me near him.  “No wonder your heart hurts if it has got all that load of trouble on it and well just get a little of that ‘scare’ off.  You put yourself in my hands and you are to do just as I tell you, and I say—­forget it!  Come with me while I make a call.  It is a long drive and I’m—­I’m lonesome sometimes myself.”

I saw the worst was over and I breathed freely again, but I had talked so much truth in that fiction that I felt just as I said I did, which is a slightly unnatural feeling for a woman.  There was nothing for it but to go with him, and I wanted to most awfully.

To my dying day I’ll never forget that little house, way out on the Cane Run Pike, he took me to in his shabby little car.  Just two tiny rooms, but they were clean and quiet and a girl with the sweetest face I ever saw lay in the bed with her eyes bright with pride and a tiny, tiny little bundle close beside her.  The young farmer was red with embarrassment and anxiety.

“She’s all right to-day, but she worries because she don’t think I can tend to the baby right,” he said; and he did look helpless.  “Her mother had to go home for two days, but is coming to-morrow.  I dasn’t undress and wash the youngster myself.  It won’t hurt him to stay bundled up until granny comes, will it, Doc?”

“Not a bit,” answered Doctor John in his big comforting voice.

But I looked at the girl and I understood her.  She wanted that baby clean and fresh even if it was just five days old, and I felt all of a sudden terribly capable.  I picked up the bundle and went into the other room with it where a kettle was boiling on the stove and a large bucket by the door.  I found things by just a glance from her, and the hour I spent with that small baby was one of the most delicious of all my life.  I never was left entirely to myself with one before and I did all I wanted to this one, guided by instinct and desire.  He slept right through and was the darlingest thing I ever saw when I laid him back on the bed by her.  I never looked in Doctor John’s direction once, though I felt him all the time.

But on the way home I gave myself the surprise of my life!  Suddenly I turned my face against his sleeve and cried as I never had before.  I felt safe, for it is a cliff road and he had to drive carefully.  However, he managed to press that one arm against my cheek in a way that comforted me into stopping when I saw we were near town.  I got out of the car at the garage and walked away through the garden home without looking in his direction at all.  I never seem to be able to look at him as I do at other people.  We hadn’t spoken two words since we had left the little house in the woods with that happy-faced girl in it.  He has more sense than just a man.