"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 sobbed 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 gulped 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 scarlet runner, I can show you how to do it. Will you do just as I tell you?" "Yes, I will," I sniffed 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 adoration 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.