Poor Mr. Carter said when Billy cut his teeth that a neighbour's baby can be worse than your own. He didn't like children, and the baby's crying disturbed him, so many a night I walked Billy out in the garden until daylight, while Mr. Carter and Dr. John both slept. Always his little, warm, wilty body has comforted me for the emptiness of not having a little one of my own. And he's very congenial, too, for he's slim and flowery, pink and dimply, and as mannish as his father, in funny little flashes. "Git a stick to punch it, Molly," he was murmuring in his sleep. Then I heard the doctor call me and I had to kiss him, put him back in his bed, and go downstairs. Dr. John was standing by the table with this horrid small book in his hand, and his mouth was set in a straight line and his eyes were deep back under their brows. I don't like him that way, yet my heart jumped so it was hard to look as meek as I felt it best under the circumstances; but I looked out from under my lashes cautiously. "There you are, Mrs. Molly," he said briskly as he handed me this book. "Get weighed and measured and sized-up generally in the morning, and follow all the directions. Also make every record I have noted so that I can have the proper data to help you as you go along--or rather down. And if you will be faithful about it to me, or rather Alfred, I think we can be sure of buttoning that blue muslin dress without even the aid of the button-hook." His voice had the "if you can" note in it that always sets me off. "Had we better get the kiddie some thinner night-rigging?" he hastened to ask as I was just about to explode. He knows the signs. "Thank you, Dr. Moore! I hate the very ground you walk on, and I'll attend to those night-clothes myself to-morrow," I answered, and I sailed out of that surgery and down the path toward my own house beyond his hedge. But I carried this book tight in my hand, and I made up my mind that I would do it all if it killed me. I would show him I could be _faithful_--to whom I would decide later on. But I hadn't read far into this book when I committed myself to myself like that! I don't know just how long I sat by the open window all by myself, bathed in a perfect flood of moonlight and loneliness. It was not a bit of comfort to hear Aunt Adeline snoring away in her room upstairs. It takes the greatest congeniality to make a person's snoring a 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 let my cottage, and move up the street into your house to protect and console you." And she did--the moving and the protecting.