"The juice of a lemon in two glasses of cold water, to be drunk immediately on wakening!" Page eleven! I've handed myself that lemon every morning now until I am sensitive with myself about it. If there was ever anybody "living a Noah's Ark sort of life" it's I, and I have to sit at the Ark window from dawn to dusk to get in the gallon of water I'm supposed to consume in that time. Some time I'm going to get mixed up and try to drink my bath, if I don't look out.  
I don't know what I'm going to do about this book, and I've got myself into trouble about writing things besides records in it. He looked at me this morning as coolly as if I was just anybody and said—
 
"I would like to see that record now, Mrs. Molly. It seems to me you are about as slim as you want to be. How did you tip the scales last time you weighed, and have you noticed any trouble at all with your heart?
 
"I weigh one hundred and thirty-four pounds, and I've got to melt and freeze and starve off that four," I answered, ignoring the heart question and also the question of producing this book. Wonder what he would do if I gave it to him to read just as it is?
 
"How about the heart?" he persisted, and I may have imagined the smile in his eyes, for his mouth was professional. Anyhow, I lowered my down on to my cheeks and answered experimentally:
 
"Sometimes it hurts." Then a happened to me.
 
"Come here to me a minute!" he said quickly, and he turned me round and put his head down between my shoulders and held me so tight against his ear that I could hardly breathe.
 
"Expand your chest three times and breathe as deep as you can," he ordered from against my back buttons. I expanded and breathed—pretty quickly at that.
 
"Now hold your breath as long as you can," he commanded, and it fitted my mood exactly to do so.
 
"Can't find anything," he said at last, letting me go and looking carefully at my face. His eyes were all anxiety; and I liked it. "When does it hurt you, and how?" he asked anxiously.
 
"Moonlight nights and lonesomely," I answered before I could stop myself, and what happened then was worse than any cyclone. He got white for a minute and just looked at me as if I was an insect stuck on a pin, then gave a short little laugh and turned to the table.
 
"I didn'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'm not joking," I said jerkily; "I am lonely. And worse than being lonely, I'm scared. I ought to have stayed just the quiet relict of Mr. Carter and gone out 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 too scared to wear 'em, and I don't know what you'll think when you see my bankbook. 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 any longer; she's going back to the cottage. Aunt Bettie Pollard says that if I want to get married I ought to marry Mr. Wilson Graves because of his 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 five years yet. Mrs. Johnson says I ought to be declared a and put as a under you. I can't help judge 's sending me flowers and Tom's walking over my front steps every day. I'm not strong enough to carry him away and drown him. I am and I'm——"
 
"Now that'll do, Molly, just for a half-minute, and let me talk to you," said Dr. 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 we'll 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. There was nothing for it but to go with him, and I wanted to most .
 
To my dying day I'll never forget that little house, away out on the hillside, he took me to in his shabby little car. Just two tiny rooms, but they were clean and quiet, and a girl with the sweetest face I ever saw, lay in the bed with her eyes bright with pride, and a tiny, tiny little bundle close beside her. The young farmer was red with and anxiety.
 
"She's all right to-day, but she worries because she don't think I can tend to the baby right," he said; and he did look helpless. "Her mother had to go home for two days, but is coming to-morrow. I dasn't undress and wash the youngster myself. It won't hurt him to stay bundled up until granny comes, will it, doc?"
 
"Not a bit," answered Dr. John in his big comforting voice.
 
But I looked at the girl, and I understood her. She wanted that baby clean and fresh, even if it was just five days old, and I felt all of a sudden terribly capable. I picked up the bundle and went into the other room with it where a kettle was boiling on the stove and a large bucket by the door. I found things by just a glance from her, and the hour I spent with that small baby was one of the most delicious of all my life. I never was left to myself with one before, and I did all I wanted to this one, guided by instinct and desire. He slept right through and was the darlingest thing I ever saw when I laid him back on the bed by her. I never looked in Dr. John's direction once, though I felt him all the time.
 
But on the way home I gave myself the surprise of my life! Suddenly I turned my face against his sleeve and cried as I never had before. I felt safe, for it is a steep road, and he had to drive carefully. However, he managed to press that one arm against my cheek in a way that comforted me into stopping when I saw we were near town. I got out of the car at the garage and walked away through the garden home, without looking in his direction at all. I never seem to be able to look at him as I do at other people. We hadn't spoken two words since we had left the little house in the woods with that happy-faced girl in it. He has more sense than just a man.
 
It was almost dusk, and I stopped in the garden a minute to pull the earth closer round some of the bachelor's-buttons that had "popped" the ground some weeks ago. Thinking about them made me my spirits, and I went on in the house quite prepared to be scolded for whatever Aunt Adeline had thought of while I was gone. Jane told me with her broadest grin that she had gone down to her sister-in-law's for supper, and I sat down with a sigh of relief.
 
Some days are like tin nutmeg-graters that everybody uses to grate you against, and this was one for me. For an hour I sat and grated my own self against Alfred's letter that had come in the morning. I realised that I would just have to come to some sort of decision about what I was going to do, for he wrote that he was coming in a week or two.
 
I like him and always have, of that I am sure. He offers me the most wonderful life in the world, and no woman could help being proud to accept it. I am lonely, more lonely than I was even willing to confess to Dr. John. I can't go on living like this any longer. Ruth Clinton has made me see that if I want Alfred it will be now or never and—quick. I know now that she loves him, and she ought to have her chance if I don't want him. The way she idolises and idealises him is a of womanly stupidity.
 
Some women like to col............