The Melting of Molly | Page 3

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 Dr.
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, so very
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 neighbour's baby
can be worse than 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 Dr. John both slept. Always his
little, warm, wilty body has comforted me for the emptiness of not
having a little one 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 downstairs.
Dr. 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 don't like him that way, yet my heart jumped
so it was hard to look as meek as I felt it best under the circumstances;
but I looked out from under my lashes cautiously.
"There you are, Mrs. Molly," he said briskly as he handed me this book.
"Get weighed and measured and sized-up generally in the morning, and
follow all the directions. Also make every record I have noted so that I
can have the proper data to help you as you go along--or rather down.
And if you will be faithful about it to me, or rather Alfred, I think we
can be sure of buttoning that blue muslin dress without even the aid of
the button-hook." His voice had the "if you can" note in it that always
sets me off.
"Had we better get the kiddie some thinner night-rigging?" he hastened
to ask as I was just about to explode. He knows the signs.
"Thank you, Dr. Moore! I hate the very ground you walk on, and I'll

attend to those night-clothes myself to-morrow," I answered, and I
sailed out of that surgery and down the path toward my own house
beyond his hedge. But I carried this book tight in my hand, and I made
up my mind that I would do it all if it killed me. I would show him I
could be _faithful_--to whom I would decide later on. But I hadn't read
far into this book when I committed myself to myself like that!
I don't know just how long I sat by the open window all by myself,
bathed in a perfect flood of moonlight and loneliness. It was not a bit of
comfort to hear Aunt Adeline snoring away in her room upstairs. It
takes the greatest congeniality to make a person's snoring a pleasure to
anybody, and Aunt Adeline and I are not that way.
When poor Mr. Carter died, the next day she said, "Now, Mary, you are
entirely too young to live all your long years of widowhood alone, and
as I am in the same condition, I will let my cottage, and move up the
street into your house to protect and console you." And she did--the
moving and the protecting.
Mr. Henderson has been dead forty-two years. He only lived three
months after he married Aunt Adeline, and her crêpe veil is over a yard
long yet. Men are the dust under her feet, but she likes Dr. John to
come over and sit with us, because she can consult with him about what
Mr. Henderson really died of, and talk with him about the sad state of
poor Mr. Carter's liver for a year before he died. I just go on rocking
Billy and singing hymns to him in such a way that I can't hear the
conversation. Mr. Carter's liver got on my nerves alive, and dead it
does worse. But it hurts when the doctor has to take the little sleep-boy
out of my arms to carry him home; though I like it when he