“Over twenty, and most of the time I am so hungry I could eat Aunt Adeline.  I dream about Billy, fried with cream gravy,” I answered, as I kissed again the back of the head that was beginning to nod down against my breast.  Long shadows lay across the garden, and the white-headed old snow-ball was signalling out of the dusk to a Dorothy Perkins rose down the walk in a scandalous way.  At best, spring is just the world’s match-making old chaperon, and ought to be watched.  I still sat on the grass, and I began to cuddle Billy’s bare knees in the skirt of my dress so the gnats couldn’t get at them.

“But, Mrs. Molly, isn’t it worth it all?” asked the doctor as he bent over toward us and looked down with something wonderful and kind in his eyes that seemed to rest on us like a benediction.  “You have been just as plucky as a girl can be, and in only a little over two months you have grown as lightfooted and hearty as a boy. I think nothing could be lovelier than you are now, but you can get off those other few pounds if you want to.  You know, don’t you, that I have known how hard some of it was, and I haven’t been able to eat as much as I usually do, thinking how hungry you are?  But isn’t it all worth it?  I think it is.  Alfred Bennett is a very great man, and it is right that he should have a very lovely wife to go out into the world with him.  And as lovely as you are I think it is wonderful of you to make all this sacrifice to be still lovelier for him.  I am glad I can help you, and it has taught me something to see how—­how faithful a woman can be across years—­and then in this smaller thing!  Now give me Bill and you get your apple and toast.  Don’t forget to take your letter in out of the dew.”  I sat perfectly still and held Billy tighter in my arms as I looked up at his father, and then after I had thought as long as I could stand it, I spoke right out at him as mad as could be, and I don’t to this minute know why.

“Nobody in the world ever doubted that a woman could be faithful if she had anything to be faithful to,” I said as I let him take Billy out of my arms at last.  “Faithfulness is what a woman flowers, only it takes a man to pick his posy.”  With which I marched into the house and left him standing with Billy in his arms, I hope dumbfounded.  I didn’t look back to see.  I always leave that man’s presence so mad I can never look back at him.  And wouldn’t it make any woman rage to have a man pick out another man for her to be faithful to when she hadn’t made any decision about it her own self?

I wonder just how old Judge Wade is?  I believe I will make up with Aunt Adeline enough before I go to bed to find out why he has never married.

Leaf III.

Men are very strange people.  They are like those sums in algebra that you think about and worry about and cry about and try to get help from other women about, and then, all of a sudden, X works itself out into perfectly good sense.