I don't know how all this is going to end, and I wish my mind wasn't in a kind of . However, I'll do the best I can and not hold myself at all responsible for myself, and then who will there be to blame?  
There are a great many kinds of good-feeling in this world, from radiant joy down to perfect ; but this spring I have got an attack of just old-fashioned happiness that looks as if it might become .
 
I am so happy that I planted my garden all , my eyes upon the clouds with the birds sailing against them, and when I became conscious I found wicked poppies right up against the sweet modest clove-pinks, while the whole paper of bachelor's-buttons was sowed over everything—which I immediately began to dig right up again, blushing furiously to myself over the trowel, and glad that I had caught myself before they grew up to laugh in my face. However, I got that laugh anyway, and I might just as well have left them, for Billy ran to the gate and called Dr. John to come in and make Molly stop digging up his buttons. Billy claims everything in this garden, and he thought they would grow up into the kind of buttons you pop out of a gun.
 
"So you're digging up the bachelor-buttons, Mrs. Molly?" the doctor asked as he leaned over the gate. I went on digging without looking up at him. I couldn't look up because I was blushing still worse. Sometimes I hate that man, and if he wasn't Billy's father I wouldn't be as friendly with him as I am. But somebody has to look after Billy.
 
I believe it will be a real relief to write down how I feel about him in his old book, and I shall do it whenever I can't stand him any longer; and if he gave the , red leather thing to me to make me he can't do it; not this spring! I wish I dare burn it up and forget about it, but I daren't! This record on the first page is enough to reduce me—to tears, and I wonder why it doesn't.
 
I weigh one hundred and sixty pounds, set down in black and white, and it is a tragedy! I don't believe that man at the weighing machine is so very reliable in his weights, though he had a very pleasant smile while he was weighing me. Still, I had better get some scales of my own, smiles are so .
 
I am five feet three inches tall or short, whichever way one looks at me. I thought I was taller, but I suppose I shall have to believe my own .
 
But as to my waist measure, I refuse to write that down, even if I have half promised Dr. John a dozen times over to do it, while I only really left him to suppose I would. It is bad enough to know that your belt has to be reduced to twenty-three inches without putting down how much it measures now in figures to insult yourself with. No, I intend to have this for my happy spring.
 
Yes, I suppose it would have been lots better for my happiness if I had kept quiet about it all, but at the time I thought I had better consult him over the matter. Now I'm sorry I did. That is one thing about being a widow, you are accustomed to consulting a man, whether you want to or not, and you can't get over the habit immediately. Poor Mr. Carter, my husband, hasn't been dead much over six years, and I must be missing him most , though just lately I can't remember not to forget about him a great deal of the time.
 
Still, that letter was enough to upset anybody, and no wonder I ran right across my garden, through Billy's hedge-hole and over into Dr. John's surgery to tell him about it; but I ought not to have been enough to let him take the letter right out of my hand and read it.
 
"So after ten years Alfred Bennett is coming back to offer his bachelor's-buttons to you, Mrs. Molly?" he said in the voice he always uses when he makes fun of Billy and me, and which never fails to make us both mad.
 
I didn't look at him directly, but I felt his hand shake with the letter in it.
 
"Not ten, only eight! He went away when I was seventeen," I answered with dignity, wishing I dared be snappy at him: though I never am.
 
"And after eight years he wants to come back and find you squeezed into a twenty-inch waist, blue muslin rag you wore at parting? No wonder Alfred didn't succeed as a bank clerk, but had to make his hit in the colonies. He's such a big gun that it is a pity he had to return to his native heath and find even such a slight disappointment as a one-yard waist measure around his—his—"
 
"Oh, it's not, it's not that much," I fairly and I couldn't help the tears coming into my eyes. I have never said much about it, but nobody knows how it hurts me to be as—large as I am. Just writing it down in a book me dreadfully. It's been coming on worse and worse every year since I married. Poor Mr. Carter had a very good appetite, and I don't know why I should have felt that I had to eat so much every day to keep him company; I wasn't always so considerate about him. Then he didn't want me to go for long walks with the dogs any more, because married women oughtn't to, or ride horseback either—no amusement left but himself; and—and—I just couldn't help the tears coming and dripping as I thought about it all and that awful waist measure in inches.
 
"Stop crying this minute, Molly," said Dr. John suddenly in the deep voice he uses to Billy and me when we are really ill or tired. "You know I was only teasing you and I won't let you——"
 
But I some more. I like him when his eyes come out from under his bushy brows and are all tender and full of sorry for us.
 
"I can't help it," I in my sleeve. "I did use to like Alfred Bennett. My heart almost broke when he went away. I used to be beautiful and slim, and now I feel as if my own fat ghost has come to haunt me all my life. I am so ashamed! If a woman can't cry over her own dead beauty, what can she cry over?" By this time I was really crying.
 
Then what happened to me was that Dr. John took me by the shoulders and gave me one good shake.
 
"You foolish child," he said in the deepest voice I almost ever heard him use. "You are just a lovely perfect flower, but if you will be happier to have Alfred Bennett come and find you as slim as a runner, I can show you how to do it. Will you do just as I tell you?"
 
"Yes, I will," I in a comforted voice. What woman wouldn't be comforted by being called a "perfect flower"? I looked out between my fingers to see what more he was going to say, but he had turned to a shelf and taken down two books.
 
"Now," he said in his most businesslike voice, as cool as a bucket of water fresh from the spring, "it is no trouble at all to take off your surplus avoirdupois at the rate of two and a half pounds a week if you follow these directions. As I take it, you are about twenty-five pounds over your normal weight. It will take over two months to reduce you, and we will allow an extra month for further beautifying, so that when Mr. Bennett arrives he will find the lady of his in proper trim to be adored. Yes, just be still until I write these directions in this little red leather blank-book for you, and every day I want you to keep an exact record of the conditions of which I make note. No, don't talk while I make out these diet lists! I wish you would go upstairs and see if you don't think we ought to get Billy a thinner set of nightgowns. It seems to me he must be too warm in the ones he is wearing."
 
When he speaks to me in that tone of voice I always do it. And I needed Billy badly at that very moment. I took him out of his little cot by Dr. John's big bed and sat down with him in my arms over by the window, through which the early moon came streaming. Billy is so little, so very little not to have a mother to rock him all the times he needs it, that I take every opportunity to give it to him I find—when he's unconscious and can't help himself. She died before she ever even saw him, and I've always tried to do what I could to make it up to him............