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 right to get mad when he teased me,
for he had been kind and interested about helping me get thin by the
time Alfred came back to see me. I couldn't tell which I was blushing
all to myself about, the "luscious peach" he had called me or the
"lovely lily" Alfred had reminded me in his letter that I had been when
he left me.

Why don't people realize that a seventeen-year-old girl's heart is a