Still, that letter was enough to upset anybody, and no wonder I ran right across my garden, through Billy’s hedge-hole and over into Doctor John’s office to tell him about it; but I ought not to have been agitated enough to let him take the letter right out of my hand and read it.

“So after ten years Al Bennett is coming back to pop his bachelor’s-buttons at you, Mrs. Molly?” he said in the deep drawling voice he always uses when he makes fun of Billy and me and which never fails to make us both mad.  I didn’t look at him directly, but I felt his hand shake with the letter in it.

“Not ten, only eight!  He went when I was seventeen,” I answered with dignity, wishing I dared be snappy at him; though I never am.

“And after eight years he wants to come back and find you squeezed into a twenty-inch-waist, blue muslin rag you wore at parting?  No wonder Al didn’t succeed at bank clerking, but had to make his hit at diplomacy and the high arts.  Some hit at that to be legationed at Saint James!  He’s such a big gun that it is a pity he had to return to his native heath and find even such a slight disappointment as a one-yard waist measure around his—­his—­”

“Oh it’s not, it’s not that much.”  I fairly gasped and I couldn’t help the tears coming into my eyes.  I have never said much about it, but nobody knows how it hurts me to be all this fat!  Just writing it down in a book mortifies me dreadfully.  It’s been coming on worse and worse every year since I married.  Poor Mr. Carter had a very good appetite and I don’t know why I should have felt that I had to eat so much every day to keep him company; I wasn’t always so considerate of him.  Then he didn’t want me to dance any more because married women oughtn’t, or ride horseback either—­no amusement left but himself and weekly prayer-meetings, and—­and—­I just couldn’t help the tears coming and dripping as I thought about it all and that awful waist measure in inches.

“Stop crying this minute, Molly,” said Doctor John suddenly in the deep voice he uses to Billy and me when we are really sick or stump-toed.  “You know I was only teasing you and I won’t stand for—­”

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 used 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 Doctor John took me by the shoulders and gave me one good shake and then made me look him right in the eyes through the tears and all.

“You foolish child,” he said in the deepest voice I almost ever heard him use.  “You are just a lovely, round, luscious peach, but if you will be happier to have Al Bennett come and find you as slim as a string-bean I can show you how to do it.  Will you do just as I tell you?”