ht line and his eyes were deep
back under their brows. I don't like him that way, yet my heart jumped
so it was hard to look as meek as I felt it best under the
circumstances; but I looked out from under my lashes cautiously.

"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