't understand you were joking," he said quietly.

That maddened me and I would have done anything to make him think
I was not the foolish thing he evidently had classified me as being.
I snatched at my mind and shook out a mixture of truth and lies that
fooled even myself and gave them to him, looking straight in his face.
I would have cracked all the ten commandments to save myself from his
contempt.

"I'm not joking," I said jerkily; "I _am_ lonesome. And worse than
being lonesome, I'm scared. I ought to have stayed just the quiet relict
of Mr. Carter and gone on to church meetings with Aunt Adeline and let
myself be fat and respectable; but I haven't got the character. You
thought I went to town to buy a monument, and I didn't; I bought enough
clothes for two brides, and now I'm scared to wear 'em, and I don't know
what you'll think when you see my bank-book. Everybody is talking about
me and that dinner-party Tuesday night, and Aunt Adeline says she can't
live in a house of mourning so desecrated any longer; she's going back
to the cottage. Aunt Bettie Pollard says that if I want to get married
I ought to do it to Mr. Wilson Graves because of the seven children and
then everybody would be so relieved that they are taken care of that
they would forget that Mr. Carter hasn't been dead quite one year yet.
Mrs. Johnson says I ought to be declared a minor and put as a ward to
you. I can't help Judge Wade's sending me flowers and Tom's sitting on
my front steps night and day. I'm not strong enough to carry him away
and murder him. I am perfectly miserable and I'm--"

"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