Mr. Van Alstyne and his wife came in that same day, just before dinner, and we played three-handed bridge for half an hour.  As I’ve said, they’d been on their honeymoon, and they were both sulky at having to stay at the Springs.  It was particularly hard on Mrs. Van Alstyne, because, with seven trunks of trousseau with her, she had to put on black.  But she used to shut herself up in her room in the evenings and deck out for Mr. Sam in her best things.  We found it out one evening when Mrs. Biggs set fire to her bureau cover with her alcohol curling-iron heater, and Mrs. Sam, who had been going around in a black crepe dress all day, rushed out in pink satin with crystal trimming, and slippers with cut-glass heels.

After the first rubber Mrs. Van Alstyne threw her cards on the floor and said another day like this would finish her.

“Surely Dick is able to come now,” she said, like a peevish child.  “Didn’t he say the swelling was all gone?”

“Do you expect me to pick up those cards?” Mr. Sam asked angrily, looking at her.

Mrs. Sam yawned and looked up at him.

“Of course I do,” she answered.  “If it wasn’t for you I’d not have stayed a moment after the funeral.  Isn’t it bad enough to have seven trunks full of clothes I’ve never worn, and to have to put on poky old black, without keeping me here in this old ladies’ home?”

Mr. Sam looked at the cards and then at her.

“I’m not going to pick them up,” he declared.  “And as to our staying here, don’t you realize that if we don’t your precious brother will never show up here at all, or stay if he does come?  And don’t you also realize that this is probably the only chance he’ll ever have in the world to become financially independent of us?”

“You needn’t be brutal,” she said sharply.  “And it isn’t so bad for you here as it is for me.  You spend every waking minute admiring Miss Jennings, while I—­there isn’t a man in the place who’ll talk anything but his joints or his stomach.”

She got up and went to the window, and Mr. Sam followed her.  Nobody pays any attention to me in the spring-house; I’m a part of it, like the brass rail around the spring, or the clock.

“I’m not admiring Miss Jennings,” he corrected, “I’m sympathizing, dear.  She looks too nice a girl to have been stung by the title bee, that’s all.”

She turned her back to him, but he pretended to tuck the hair at the back of her neck up under her comb, and she let him do it.  As I stooped to gather up the cards he kissed the tip of her ear.

“Listen,” he said, “there’s a scream of a play down at Finleyville to-night called Sweet Peas.  Senator Biggs and the bishop went down last night, and they say it’s the worst in twenty years.  Put on a black veil and let’s slip away and see it.”

I think she agreed to do it, but that night after dinner, Amanda King, who has charge of the news stand, told me the sheriff had closed the opera-house and that the leading woman was sick at the hotel.