He was in the habit of coming to the spring-house every day to get his morning glass of water and read the papers.  For a good many years it had been his custom to sit there, in the winter by the wood fire and in the summer just inside the open door, and to read off the headings aloud while I cleaned around the spring and polished glasses.

“I see the president is going fishing, Minnie,” he’d say, or “Airbrake is up to 133; I wish I’d bought it that time I dreamed about it.  It was you who persuaded me not to, Minnie.”

And all that winter, with the papers full of rumors that Miss Patty Jennings was going to marry a prince, we’d followed it by the spring-house fire, the old doctor and I, getting angry at the Austrian emperor for opposing it when we knew how much too good Miss Patty was for any foreigner, and then getting nervous and fussed when we read that the prince’s mother was in favor of the match and it might go through.  Miss Patty and her father came every winter to Hope Springs and I couldn’t have been more anxious about it if she had been my own sister.

Well, as I say, it all began the very day the old doctor died.  He stamped out to the spring-house with the morning paper about nine o’clock, and the wedding seemed to be all off.  The paper said the emperor had definitely refused his consent and had sent the prince, who was his cousin, for a Japanese cruise, while the Jennings family was going to Mexico in their private car.  The old doctor was indignant, and I remember how he tramped up and down the spring-house, muttering that the girl had had a lucky escape, and what did the emperor expect if beauty and youth and wealth weren’t enough.  But he calmed down, and soon he was reading that the papers were predicting an early spring, and he said we’d better begin to increase our sulphur percentage in the water.

I hadn’t noticed anything strange in his manner, although we’d all noticed how feeble he was growing, but when he got up to go back to the sanatorium and I reached him his cane, it seemed to me he avoided looking at me.  He went to the door and then turned and spoke to me over his shoulder.

“By the way,” he remarked, “Mr. Richard will be along in a day or so, Minnie.  You’d better break it to Mrs. Wiggins.”

Since the summer before we’d had to break Mr. Dick’s coming to Mrs. Wiggins the housekeeper, owing to his finding her false front where it had blown out of a window, having been hung up to dry, and his wearing it to luncheon as whiskers.  Mr. Dick was the old doctor’s grandson.

“Humph!” I said, and he turned around and looked square at me.

“He’s a good boy at heart, Minnie,” he said.  “We’ve had our troubles with him, you and I, but everything has been quiet lately.”

When I didn’t say anything he looked discouraged, but he had a fine way of keeping on until he gained his point, had the old doctor.

“It has been quiet, hasn’t it?” he demanded.