“He’s not out of the widower-woods yet, Caroline,” said Aunt Bettie with her most speculative smile.  “I have about decided on him for Ruth since the judge has taken to following Molly about as bad as Billy Moore does.  But don’t you all say a word, for John’s mighty timid, and I don’t believe, in spite of all these years, he’s had a single notion yet.  If he had had he’d have tried a set-to with you, Molly, like all the rest of the shy birds in town.  He doesn’t see a woman as anything but a patient at the end of a spoon, and mighty kind and gentle he does the dosing of them, too.  Just the other day—­dearie me, Judy, what has boiled over now?” And in the excitement that ensued I escaped to the garden.

Yes, Aunt Bettie is right about Doctor John; he doesn’t see a woman, and there is no way to make him.  What she had said about it made me realize that he had always been like that, and I told myself that there was no reason in the world why my heart should beat in my slippers on that account.  Still I don’t see why Ruth Chester should have her head literally thrown against that stone wall and I wish Aunt Bettie wouldn’t.  It seemed like a desecration even to try to match-make him and it made me hot with indignation all over.  I dug so fiercely at the roots of my phlox with a trowel I had picked up that they groaned so loud I could almost hear them.  I felt as if I must operate on something.  And it was in this mood that Alfred’s letter found me.

It had a surprise in it and I sat back on the grass and read it with my heart beating like a trip-hammer.  He had sailed the day he had posted it and he was due to arrive in New York almost as soon as it did, just any hour now I calculated in a flash.  And “from New York immediately to Hillsboro” he had written in words that fairly sung themselves off the paper.  I was frightened—­so frightened that the letter shook in my hands, and with only the thought of being sure that I might be alone for a few minutes with it, I fled to the garret.

Surely no woman ever in all the world read such a letter as that, and no wonder my breath almost failed me.  It was a love-letter in which the cold paper was transubstantiated into a heart that beat against mine and I bowed my head over it as I wet it with tears.  I knew then that I had taken his coming back lightly; had fussed over it and been silly-proud of it; while not really caring at all.  All that awful melting away of my fatness seemed just a lack of confidence in his love for me; he wouldn’t have minded if I weighed five hundred, I felt sure.  He loved me—­really, really, really; and I had sat and weighed him with a lot of men who were nothing more than amused by my flightiness, or taken with my beauty, and who wouldn’t have known such love if it were shown to them through a telescope.

[Illustration:  His letters were all there and his photographs]