Yes, I suppose it would have been lots better for my happiness if I had kept quiet about it all, but at the time I thought I had better consult him over the matter.  Now I’m sorry I did.  That is one thing about being a widow, you are accustomed to consulting a man, whether you want to or not, and you can’t get over the habit immediately.  Poor Mr. Carter, my husband, hasn’t been dead much over six years, and I must be missing him most awfully, though just lately I can’t remember not to forget about him a great deal of the time.

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 Dr. John’s surgery 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 Alfred Bennett is coming back to offer his bachelor’s-buttons to you, Mrs. Molly?” he said in the 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 away 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 Alfred didn’t succeed as a bank clerk, but had to make his hit in the colonies.  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 as—­large as I am.  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 about him.  Then he didn’t want me to go for long walks with the dogs any more, because married women oughtn’t to, or ride horseback either—­no amusement left but himself; 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 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.