“They say she looked funny last night,” Amanda finished, “and I guess she’s got the mumps.”

Mumps!

My joint gave a throb at that minute.

CHAPTER IV

AND A WAY

Mr. Sam wasn’t taking any chances, for the next day he went to the city himself to bring Mr. Dick up.  Everything was quiet that day and the day after, except that on the second day I had a difference of opinion with the house doctor and he left.

The story of the will had got out, of course, and the guests were waiting to see Mr. Dick come and take charge.  I got a good bit of gossip from Miss Cobb, who had had her hair cut short after a fever and used to come out early in the morning and curl it all over her head, heating the curler on the fire log.  I never smell burnt hair that I don’t think of Miss Cobb trying to do the back of her neck.  She was one of our regulars, and every winter for ten years she’d read me the letters she had got from an insurance agent who’d run away with a married woman the day before the wedding.  She kept them in a bundle, tied with lavender ribbon.

It was on the third day, I think, that Miss Cobb told me that Miss Patty and her father had had a quarrel the day before.  She got it from one of the chambermaids.  Mr. Jennings was a liver case and not pleasant at any time, but he had been worse than usual.  Annie, the chambermaid, told Miss Cobb that the trouble was about settlements, and that the more Miss Patty tried to tell him it was the European custom the worse he got.  Miss Patty hadn’t come down to breakfast that day, and Mr. Moody and Senator Biggs made a wager in the Turkish bath—­according to Miss Cobb—­Mr. Moody betting the wedding wouldn’t come off at all.

“Of course,” Miss Cobb said, wetting her finger and trying the iron to see if it was hot, “of course, Minnie, they’re not married yet, and if Father Jennings gets ugly and makes any sort of scandal it’s all off.  A scandal just now would be fatal.  These royalties are very touchy about other people’s reputations.”

Well, I heard that often enough in the next few days.

Mr. Sam hadn’t come back by the morning of the sixth day, but he wired his wife the day before that Mr. Dick was on the way.  But we met every train with a sleigh, and he didn’t come.  I was uneasy, knowing Mr. Dick, and Mrs. Sam was worried, too.

By that time everybody was waiting and watching, and on the early train on the sixth day came the lawyer, a Mr. Stitt.  Mr. Thoburn was going around with a sort of greasy smile, and if I could have poisoned him safely I’d have done it.

It had been snowing hard for a day or so, and at eleven o’clock that day I saw Miss Cobb and Mrs. Biggs coming down the path to the spring-house, Mrs. Biggs with her crocheting-bag hanging to the handle of her umbrella.  I opened the door, but they wouldn’t come in.