“Tillie,” I said, “can you trust me?”

She looked up from her beef.

“Whether I can or not, I always have,” she answered.

“Well, can I trust you?  That’s more to the point.”

She put down her knife and came over to me, with her hands on her hips.

“I don’t know what you’re up to, Minnie,” she said, “and I don’t know that I care.  But if you’ve forgotten the time I went to the city and brought you sulphur and the Lord only knows what for your old spring when you’d run short and were laid up with influenza—­”

“Hush!” I exclaimed.  “You needn’t shout it.  Tillie, I don’t want you to ask me any questions, but I want four raw eggs in a basket, a pot of coffee and cream, some fruit if you can get it when the chef unlocks the refrigerator room, and bread and butter.  They can make their own toast.”

“They?” she said, with her mouth open.

But I didn’t explain any more.  I had found Tillie about a year before, frying sausages at the railroad station, and made her diet cook at the sanatorium.  Mrs. Wiggins hadn’t wanted her, but, as I told the old doctor at the time, we needed somebody in the kitchen to keep an eye on things for us.  It was through Tillie that we discovered that the help were having egg-nog twice a day, with eggs as scarce as hens’ teeth, and the pharmacy clerk putting in a requisition for more whisky every week.

Well, I scribbled a note to Mr. Van Alstyne, telling what had happened, and put it under his door, and then I met Miss Patty in the hall by the billiard room and I gave her some coffee from the basket, in the sun parlor.  It was still dark, although it was nearly eight o’clock, and nobody saw us go out together.  Just as we left I heard the chef in the kitchen bawling out that he’d murder whoever put the kettle against the bell, and Tillie saying it must have dropped off the hook and landed there.

We went to the spring-house first, to avoid suspicion, and then across back of the deer park to the shelter-house.  It was still snowing, but not so much, and the tracks we had made early in the morning were still there, mine off to one side alone, and the others close together and side by side.  There was a whole history in those snow tracks, mine alone and kind of offish, and the others cuddling together.  It made me lonely to look at them.

I remember wishing I’d taught school, as I was educated to; woman wasn’t made to live alone, and most school-teachers get married.

Miss Patty did not say much.  She was holding her chin high and looking rather angry and determined.  At the spring-house I gave her the basket and took an armful of fire-wood myself.  I knew Mr. Dick would never think of it until the fire was out.

They were both asleep in the shelter-house.  He was propped up against the wall on a box, with the rubber carriage robe around him, and she was lying by the fire, with Mrs. Moody’s shawl over her and her muff under her head.  Miss Patty stood in the doorway for an instant.  Then she walked over and, leaning down, shook her sister by the arm.