[Illustration:  “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 “luscious peach”.  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 copy 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 across the hall and see if you don’t think we ought to get Bill a thinner set of night-drawers.  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 Doctor 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, 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.

Poor Mr. Carter said when Billy cut his teeth that a neighbor’s baby can be worse than twins of 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 Doctor John both slept.  Always his little, warm, wilty body has comforted me for the emptiness of not having a baby 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 across the hall.

Doctor 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 hate him that way, too, and I would like to get up so close to him that he couldn’t hit me or have a door locked between us.  It’s strange how the thought of taking a beating from a man can make a woman’s heart jump.  Mine jumped so it was hard to look as meek as I felt best under the circumstances; but I looked it out from under my lashes cautiously.