“There you are, Mrs. Molly,” he said briskly as he handed me this book.  “Get weighed and measured and sized-up generally in the morning, and follow all the directions.  Also make every record I have noted so that I can have the proper data to help you as you go along—­or rather down.  And if you will be faithful about it to me, or rather Alfred, I think we can be sure of buttoning that blue muslin dress without even the aid of the button-hook.”  His voice had the “if you can” note in it that always sets me off.

“Had we better get the kiddie some thinner night-rigging?” he hastened to ask as I was just about to explode.  He knows the signs.

“Thank you, Dr. Moore!  I hate the very ground you walk on, and I’ll attend to those night-clothes myself to-morrow,” I answered, and I sailed out of that surgery and down the path toward my own house beyond his hedge.  But I carried this book tight in my hand, and I made up my mind that I would do it all if it killed me.  I would show him I could be faithful—­to whom I would decide later on.  But I hadn’t read far into this book when I committed myself to myself like that!

I don’t know just how long I sat by the open window all by myself, bathed in a perfect flood of moonlight and loneliness.  It was not a bit of comfort to hear Aunt Adeline snoring away in her room upstairs.  It takes the greatest congeniality to make a person’s snoring a pleasure to anybody, and Aunt Adeline and I are not that way.

When poor Mr. Carter died, the next day she said, “Now, Mary, you are entirely too young to live all your long years of widowhood alone, and as I am in the same condition, I will let my cottage, and move up the street into your house to protect and console you.”  And she did—­the moving and the protecting.

Mr. Henderson has been dead forty-two years.  He only lived three months after he married Aunt Adeline, and her crepe veil is over a yard long yet.  Men are the dust under her feet, but she likes Dr. John to come over and sit with us, because she can consult with him about what Mr. Henderson really died of, and talk with him about the sad state of poor Mr. Carter’s liver for a year before he died.  I just go on rocking Billy and singing hymns to him in such a way that I can’t hear the conversation.  Mr. Carter’s liver got on my nerves alive, and dead it does worse.  But it hurts when the doctor has to take the little sleep-boy out of my arms to carry him home; though I like it when he says under his breath, “Thank you, Molly.”

And as I sat and thought how near he and I had been to each other in all our troubles, I excused myself for running to him with that letter, and I acknowledged to myself that I had no right to get vexed when he teased me, for he had been kind and interested about helping me get thin by the time Alfred came back to see me.  I couldn’t tell which I was blushing all to myself about, the “perfect flower” he had called me, or the “lovely lily” Alfred had reminded me in his letter that I had been when he left me.