The Melting of Molly | Page 5

money would make me nervous if Mr. Carter hadn't made
Doctor John its guardian, though I sometimes feel that the

responsibility of me makes him treat me as if he were my
step-grandfather-in-law. But all in all, though stiff in its knees with
aristocracy, Hillsboro is lovely and loving; and couldn't inquisitiveness
be called just real affection with a kind of squint in its eye?
And there I sat on my front steps, being embraced in a perfume of
everybody's lilacs and peachblow and sweet syringa and affectionate
interest and moonlight, with a letter in my hand from the man whose
two photographs and many letters I had kept locked up in the garret for
years. Is it any wonder I tingled when he told me that he had never
come back because he couldn't have me and that now the minute he
landed in America he was going to lay his heart at my feet? I added his
honors to his prostrate heart myself and my own beat at the prospect.
All the eight years faded away and I was again back in the old garden
down at Aunt Adeline's cottage saying good-by, folded up in his arms.
That's the way my memory put the scene to me, but the word "folded"
made me remember that blue muslin dress again. I had promised to
keep it and wear it for him when he came back--and I couldn't forget
that the blue belt was just twenty-three inches and mine is--no, I
_won't_ write it. I had got that dress out of the old trunk not ten minutes
after I had read the letter and measured it.
No, nobody would blame me for running right across the garden to
Doctor John with such a real trouble as that! All of a sudden I hugged
the letter and the little book up close to my breast and laughed until the
tears ran down my cheeks.
Then before I went into the house I assembled my garden and had
family prayers with my flowers. I do that because they are all the
family I've got, and God knows that all His budding things need
encouragement, whether it is a widow or a snowball-bush. He'll give it
to us!
And I'm praying again as I sit here and watch for the doctor's light to go
out. I hate to go to sleep and leave it burning, for he sits up so late and
he is so gaunt and thin and tired-looking most times. That's what the
last prayer is about, almost always,--sleep for him and no night call!

LEAF SECOND
A LOVE-LETTER, LOADED
The very worst page in this red--red devil--I'm glad I've written it at

last--of a book is the fifth. It says:
"Breakfast--one slice of dry toast, one egg, fruit and a tablespoonful of
baked cereal, small cup of coffee, no sugar, no cream." And me with
two Jersey cows full of the richest cream in Hillsboro, Harpeth Valley,
out in my pasture!
"Dinner, one small lean chop, slice of toast, spinach, green beans and
lettuce salad. No dessert or sweet." The blue-grass in my yard is full of
fat little fryers and I wish I were a sheep if I have to eat lettuce and
spinach for grass. At least I'd have more than one chop inside me then.
"Supper--slice of toast and an apple." Why the apple? Why supper at
all?
Oh, I'm hungry, hungry until I cry in my sleep when I dream about a
muffin! I thought at first that getting out of bed before my eyes are
fairly open and turning myself into a circus actor by doing every kind
of overhand, foot, arm and leg contortion that the mind of cruel man
could invent to torture a human being with, would kill me before I had
been at it a week, but when I read on page sixteen that as soon as all
that horror was over I must jump right into the tub of cold water, I
kicked, metaphorically speaking. And I've been kicking ever since,
literally to keep from freezing.
[Illustration: She shrouds me for the agony]
But as cruel a death as freezing is, it doesn't compare to the tortures of
being melted. Judy administers it to me and her faithful heart is so
wrung with compassion that she perspires almost as much as I do. She
wrings a linen sheet out in a caldron of boiling water and shrouds me in
it for the agony--and then more and more blanket windings envelop me
until I am like the mummy of some Egyptian giantess. I have ice on the
back of my neck and my forehead, and murder for the whole world in
my heart. Once I got so discouraged at the idea of