The Melting of Molly | Page 4

get vexed when he teased me, for he had been kind and interested about helping me get thin by the time Alfred came back to see me. I couldn't tell which I was blushing all to myself about, the "perfect flower" he had called me, or the "lovely lily" Alfred had reminded me in his letter that I had been when he left me.
Why don't people realise that a seventeen-year-old girl's heart is a sensitive wind-flower that may be shattered by a breath? Mine shattered when Alfred went away to find something he could do to make a living, and Aunt Adeline gave the hard green stem to Mr. Carter when she insisted on marrying me to him. Poor Mr. Carter!
No, I wasn't nineteen, and this town was full of women who were aunts and cousins and law-kin to me, and nobody did anything for me. They all said, with a sigh of relief, "It will be such a nice safe thing for you, Molly." And they really didn't mean anything by tying up a gay, frolicking, prancing colt of a girl with a terribly ponderous bridle.
No, the town didn't mean anything but kindness by marrying me to Mr. Carter, and they didn't consider him in the matter at all, poor man! Of that I feel sure. Hillsboro is like that. It settled itself here in this north country a few hundreds of years ago, and has been hatching and clucking over its own small affairs ever since. All the houses stand back from the street with their wings spread out over their gardens, and mothers here go on hovering even to the third and fourth generation. Lots of times young, long-legged boys scramble out of the nests and go off and decide to grow up where their crow will be heard by the world. Alfred was one of them.
And, too, occasionally some man comes along from the big world and marries a girl and takes her away with him, but mostly they stay and go to hovering life on a corner of the family estate. That's what I did.
I was a poor, little, lonely chick with frivolous tendencies, and they all clucked me over into this Carter nest, which they considered well-feathered for me. It gave them all a sensation when they found out from the will just how well it was feathered. And it gave me one too. All that money would make me nervous if Mr. Carter hadn't made Dr. 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 manners, Hillsboro is lovely and loving; and couldn't inquisitiveness be called just real affection with a kind of turn in its eye?
And there I sat in my front room, being embraced in a perfume of everybody's lilacs and hawthorns and affectionate interest and moonlight, with a letter in my hand from the man whose two photographs and letters I used to keep locked up in my desk. 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 England he was going to lay his heart at my feet? I added his colonial honours 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-bye, 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 Dr. John with such a real trouble as that! All of a sudden I hugged the letter and the little book and laughed until the tears ran down my cheeks.
Then, before I went to bed, I went round 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