No, the town didn't mean anything by chastening my spirit with Mr. Carter and they didn't consider him in the matter at all, poor man. Of that I feel sure. Hillsboro is like that. It settled itself here in a Tennessee valley a few hundreds of years ago and has been hatching and clucking over its own small affairs ever since. All the houses set back from the street with their wings spread out over their gardens, and mothers here go on hovering even to the third and fourth generation. Lots of times young, long-legged, frying-size boys scramble out of the nests and go off to college and decide to grow up where their crow will be heard by the world. Alfred was one of them. And, too, occasionally some man comes along from the big world and marries a plump little broiler and takes her away with him, but mostly they stay and go to hovering life on a corner of the family estate. That's what I did. I was a poor, little, lost chick with frivolous tendencies and they all clucked me over into this empty Carter nest which they considered well-feathered for me. It gave them all a sensation when they found out from the will just how well it was feathered. And it gave me one, too. All that money would make me nervous if Mr. Carter hadn't made Doctor John its guardian, though I sometimes feel that the responsibility of me makes him treat me as if he were my step-grandfather-in-law. But all in all, though stiff in its knees with aristocracy, Hillsboro is lovely and loving; and couldn't inquisitiveness be called just real affection with a kind of squint in its eye? And there I sat on my front steps, being embraced in a perfume of everybody's lilacs and peachblow and sweet syringa and affectionate interest and moonlight, with a letter in my hand from the man whose two photographs and many letters I had kept locked up in the garret for years. Is it any wonder I tingled when he told me that he had never come back because he couldn't have me and that now the minute he landed in America he was going to lay his heart at my feet? I added his honors to his prostrate heart myself and my own beat at the prospect. All the eight years faded away and I was again back in the old garden down at Aunt Adeline's cottage saying good-by, folded up in his arms. That's the way my memory put the scene to me, but the word "folded" made me remember that blue muslin dress again. I had promised to keep it and wear it for him when he came back--and I couldn't forget that the blue belt was just twenty-three inches and mine is--no, I _won't_ write it. I had got that dress out of the old trunk not ten minutes after I had read the letter and measured it. No, nobody would blame me for running right across the garden to Doctor John with such a real trouble as that! All of a sudden I hugged the letter and the little book up close to my breast and laughed until the tears ran down my cheeks.