s you go along--or rather down.
And if you will be faithful about it to me, or rather Al, 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, Doctor 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 office 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 on the front steps 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 down the dark
hall. 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 rent my cottage and move right
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 for Doctor John to
come over and sit on the porch 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